Converting Pixel drawing to Vector?

[Phil_rose]

2 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

How did Qui-Gon Jinn said: "There's always a bigger fish". - Meaning here in this context, there's always another app, which might do quite better!

Right but the one the Serif used to have in Drawplus worked really well and I don't really want to have to get out of the pond I'm in and drag the design to another pond every time I want to get to this 'bigger fish'. There is value in having functionality within the program one is using. 

[MikeW]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

I think part of the reason for that is not all apps share a common exchange file format that can be used to switch between apps to do something in one app that another can't do at all or is much to tedious to do on a regular basis.

 

That's true in part or the whole depending on the applications involved. Mostly the "in part" part...

 

I usually use the PSD format between painting applications, layers and all. I usually use an export format that retains layers and what not with vector editing applications, which may mean exporting to the native format of the receiving application, an intermediary format or a PDF.

 

I have never owned a single piece of software that does everything I need. I've swapped files between applications for eons. While some may think it a tedious exercise, what are the alternatives? A redesign, a scale back of whatever little vision I have of the illustration, or ? None of which are acceptable for me. If one knows their applications, and what formats play nicely with others, it takes seconds to swap out.

 

And I have long needed to do this as regards drawing ease with say Adobe Illustrator. I hate drawing in the thing. And because of that, I am simply not efficient at it. So I will draw in something else all the way up to doing raster effects if needed, then export and open in AI to finish off. And sometimes, that is the file format I need to return to the client and so if nothing else, AI is used as a glorified file converter. Same goes with PS.

 

At least the other applications I use do play nice with others. By being at least familiar with other software has opened doors I may not have had the opportunity to go through if I was "single application" minded. Despite having application preferences, I consider myself a software agnostic.

 

And I have found the perfect way of avoiding what you call tedium. Paying the bills.

[v_kyr]

Honestly If you need that functionality urgently now and yet look elsewhere or redraw the stuff by hand. I think this theme with a missing autotracer component started from the beginnings some three to four years ago and as you can see until today there is nothing like this included so far. So all related to that theme is always only a roundabout, people demand that feature and in turn you hear the common answer phrases. - Somehow looks to me all as a waste of time here, and forever the marmot greets (Groundhog Day).

[toltec]

54 minutes ago, MikeW said:

 

And I have found the perfect way of avoiding what you call tedium. Paying the bills.

 

If ever you get really bored, you are welcome to pay my bills too 

[toltec]

1 hour ago, Phil_rose said:

I don't really want to have to get out of the pond I'm in and drag the design to another pond every time I want to get to this 'bigger fish'. There is value in having functionality within the program one is using. 

 

Thats the reason some programs become bloated, slow and inefficient. Trying to do every single function under the sun.

 

And it would probably be written by Microsoft.

[Phil_rose]

12 hours ago, toltec said:

 

Thats the reason some programs become bloated, slow and inefficient.

 

A good point well put! 

[virtualtype]

An auto-trace feature would be great in Affinity Designer so as to achieve scaleable distress like effects for graphics on t-shirts etc.

For example I'd like to be able to import a black and white posterised image of a stone or metal texture for auto-tracing, then use the result

to knock out a distress like effect from a finished logo or whatever - the advantage of auto-trace is that it's scaleable for printing at any size.

I often used auto-trace in Illustrator to do the above, and would really like to see this feature in Affinity Designer!

 

I've quickly demonstrated my point further with the attached files below, except I had to use: https://convertio.co/ to convert

a posterised image from Affinity Photo to .eps format then opened in Affinity Designer. I combined all the curve layers of the resulting

.eps auto-trace effect with the pathfinder, then used the pathfinder again to knock the texture out of the shape, resulting in what

could potentially be a totally scaleable logo for print etc.

auto-trace_effect.afdesign

texture.eps

[Al S]

+1 for the tracing feature (or converting to vector). I did use http://image-vectorizer.com/ and it work very well indeed. I'd rather have it included in the cost of Affinity though as $9.95 can mount up... Throw another $30-50 on affinity instead!

[TomG71]

I also needed to convert a simple pixel-graphic into a vector graphic. This Youtube video made this pretty easy in Affinity Designer. A bit of work, and you have to be as exact as you could, but it works!

I hope I am allowed to post this here...

[roderick]

I've never seen a carpenter the uses one tool for everything. I don't expect one piece of software to fulfill all my design needs. An experienced designer has many different tools and resources. That being said, this is my go-to tool for tracing: https://www.vectorizer.io

[firstdefence]

I use Vector Magic, when used commercially it pays for itself very quickly.

[tysiva]

On 4/5/2017 at 4:02 AM, pruus said:

@ jea525: You could try some onine vectorizer: https://convertio.co.

Sad that Affinity doesn't have this but this is a great rec, @pruus! For a once-in-a-while user like myself, this fit the bill perfectly

[DBerlin81]

On 3/27/2017 at 8:51 AM, MEB said:

Hi Retep,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

No, Affinity Photo/Designer doesn't have an auto-tracing feature/functionality not is able to convert a pixel selection into a vector shape at the moment.

You will have to use a third party software for that like Image Vectorizer, Vector Magic, or Super Vectorizer 2. Inkscape (open-source) also includes tracing functionality.

Your current profile image looks as though a good amount of vectorising went into the making of it. What program did you use? 

[MEB]

Hi DBerlin81,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
It wasn't auto-traced. It was drawn manually.

[chirmer]

This is just so frustrating. I have generally been enjoying my time with the Affinity Suite, and Publisher especially is killer software, but missing features like this really make things super difficult to get work done, when Adobe has them and they work.

Sometimes we have to work with graphics we get from outside organizations, and we have no control over quality. Like right now, I have a logo I need to put on a vehicle wrap that's simply a JPG file with a white background. I need to vectorize it and make the whole thing white, so it pops against the colored wrap. And I can't, because this software suite is missing this, IMO, core functionality.

I have now put the logo through vectorize it and convertio and neither can convert it. Which is ironic, because the logo was clearly designed in Illustrator using default brushes. So I can't even re-create it, because I don't have those brushes, either.

Illustrator was so much better in this space, and had the tools needed to get this work done. In an ideal world, you'd be able to get usable vector files from everyone, but that's isn't reality. And Affinity is making this very, very difficult.

If I have to download other software to do stuff like this, I might as well just download Illustrator and be done with it. Which is frustrating, because I much prefer the Affinity suite.

TL;DR: add another vote for adding in vector tracing.

[SrPx]

For a logo is highly recommended to trace manually (if all the legal grounds are covered, as is a no-way in many cases). As for such thing an auto tracer will require such heavy nodes cleaning that the work for that is more time consuming than just tracing over manually. And the latter is always more optimized and accurate. Provided there are legal permissions to produce such a version of the logo, I'd manually do the vectors. An usual logo will be about 10 -30 nodes, or the like.  Quite fast.  If is for dirty and  even faster works and tasks, you're even better just doing some selection to eliminate the white, and then apply whatever the hue or fill to the layer transparency selection, or as a layer effect, etc. In photo, maybe using its "vector " tools to trace over the logo, then fill with the color, or etc

[chirmer]

14 hours ago, SrPx said:

For a logo is highly recommended to trace manually (if all the legal grounds are covered, as is a no-way in many cases). As for such thing an auto tracer will require such heavy nodes cleaning that the work for that is more time consuming than just tracing over manually. And the latter is always more optimized and accurate. Provided there are legal permissions to produce such a version of the logo, I'd manually do the vectors. An usual logo will be about 10 -30 nodes, or the like.  Quite fast.  If is for dirty and  even faster works and tasks, you're even better just doing some selection to eliminate the white, and then apply whatever the hue or fill to the layer transparency selection, or as a layer effect, etc. In photo, maybe using its "vector " tools to trace over the logo, then fill with the color, or etc

You are assuming these are well-made logos lol. The one I'm working with, at least, was made using the default textured brush in Illustrator. I can't manually trace all of those little edges and textures, and I'm not going to modify their logo for my convenience and taste. 

We are all professionals here. We all know that we are capable of recreating logos that support it. These tools are useful in situations that are less than ideal, where we need stuff as vector but don't have the time/resources or for a variety of reasons cannot simply recreate the logo/work.

[Guest]

I absolutely agree. Would be great to have this auto-trace function added to Affinity Designer in the future. 

Is there a link to add that feature request somewhere?

[Tim T.]

Yes! Feature request, where can we add it! Would make Affinity even "more" perfect!

[doe]

+ 1 from me. IMHO this should be a given core feature.

[wonderings]

On 2/25/2020 at 2:41 PM, chirmer said:

This is just so frustrating. I have generally been enjoying my time with the Affinity Suite, and Publisher especially is killer software, but missing features like this really make things super difficult to get work done, when Adobe has them and they work.

Sometimes we have to work with graphics we get from outside organizations, and we have no control over quality. Like right now, I have a logo I need to put on a vehicle wrap that's simply a JPG file with a white background. I need to vectorize it and make the whole thing white, so it pops against the colored wrap. And I can't, because this software suite is missing this, IMO, core functionality.

I have now put the logo through vectorize it and convertio and neither can convert it. Which is ironic, because the logo was clearly designed in Illustrator using default brushes. So I can't even re-create it, because I don't have those brushes, either.

Illustrator was so much better in this space, and had the tools needed to get this work done. In an ideal world, you'd be able to get usable vector files from everyone, but that's isn't reality. And Affinity is making this very, very difficult.

If I have to download other software to do stuff like this, I might as well just download Illustrator and be done with it. Which is frustrating, because I much prefer the Affinity suite.

TL;DR: add another vote for adding in vector tracing.

You are comparing software that has been around and refined for many years, to software that is new from the ground up. It is no Adobe replacement yet in my opinion, but it can do a lot of things and for the price point if you are not a pro user making their living with the software it is a fantastic option. Does it do everything? no. Buy you are paying a fraction of the price of the Adobe software. 

[jarjar]

You can use this incredible online editor to convert images to svg:

https://www.photopea.com

[Guest]

Oh, wow! Photopea seems to be doing a great job! Thank you for the link!

Online tutorial: https://www.photopea.com/tuts/vectorize-raster-images/

[BEGRAFX]

On 5/1/2020 at 12:49 PM, wonderings said:

You are comparing software that has been around and refined for many years, to software that is new from the ground up. It is no Adobe replacement yet in my opinion, but it can do a lot of things and for the price point if you are not a pro user making their living with the software it is a fantastic option. Does it do everything? no. Buy you are paying a fraction of the price of the Adobe software. 

Yes, Illustrator has been around longer, and has had more of a chance to "refine", we understand that. I don't think anyone is expecting Affinity (or any other) to be "as polished" from the start, as a tool that's been out for over a decade. I think we all agree with you completely, that Affinity can do a lot of things, and is a great deal for the price point. But you hit right on a key issue. Many of us ARE Pro Users, making our living with this software as one of the tools in our kit. As others have said, we don't expect it to do everything. No carpenter uses any one tool exclusively. However, many of us have switched to the Affinity Suite from the Adobe Suite, and Affinity Designer has done a great job at replacing Illustrator for us. Vastly better than Inkscape or others out there. But to say we are expecting it to "do everything" is unfair. I don't think any of us expect that. We DO expect a "Brand X" Hammer will drive a nail as well as the "Brand Y" Hammer that it replaces. We've come to see Affinity Designer as a solid replacement for Illustrator, and we've come to see Affinity Photo as a solid replacement for Photoshop, and Affinity Publisher for InDesign. We all realize that things take time, however this thread has been going for 2-3 years now. I think by this point, we are at least hoping to hear from Affinity/Serif, that Vectorizing/Image Trace is something that IS on the drawing board. Are we expecting it to be in the next update? Sure, it'd be nice, but I think we'd all just like to hear, "We've heard you, it is in the works, we hope to have it available in... 6 months, 12 months, whatever. We love Affinity/Serif, we're just looking for some communication from them. 

Thank you.

[creator]

On 2/17/2019 at 8:35 AM, firstdefence said:

I use Vector Magic, when used commercially it pays for itself very quickly.

@firstdefence Some weeks ago I was on the way to buy the desktop version of Vector Magic. Since there are no updates since five years, I tried to get in contact with their support. Didn't get any answer, they seem to be out of business.

Good I found https://www.vectorizer.io now, which seems to be great, even with dxf export. 😀