AutoTrace (convert raster image to vector)

[Kuttyjoe]

On 2/9/2020 at 10:40 AM, Mark Ingram said:

Considering we've stopped selling that product, I'm surprised to see someone offering it for sale on Amazon (note it's not Amazon selling this, it's someone called "Ok-James").

I actually bought two copies from a company called Bonanza.  $15.00 each.

[spidermurph]

That is a good deal. Very powerful program. I just spent a large part of today using it to AutoTrace elements from old film posters for restoration.

[DeezelPower]

This is a feature I would really like and cannot believe its not in at least the Designer program, I decided to get a copy of DrawPlus x8 so that I can convert Bitmap to Vector and WOW this program does this incredibly and in my thinking this is that same company that makes Affinity Programs so why could that not use this code in the Affinity range of programs they have missed a key feature in my option.

Please consider implementing this into Affinity ASAP looks like there are quite a few people wanting this, I have only signed up on the forum to post this so that show how much I want and there must be other people that just put up with the work round method.....

[home]

this page works really well 

https://www.vectorizer.io/

[Joao Silva]

On 3/4/2020 at 12:13 PM, DeezelPower said:

This is a feature I would really like and cannot believe its not in at least the Designer program, I decided to get a copy of DrawPlus x8 so that I can convert Bitmap to Vector and WOW this program does this incredibly and in my thinking this is that same company that makes Affinity Programs so why could that not use this code in the Affinity range of programs they have missed a key feature in my option.

Please consider implementing this into Affinity ASAP looks like there are quite a few people wanting this, I have only signed up on the forum to post this so that show how much I want and there must be other people that just put up with the work round method.....

I actually was thinking the same exact thing... i have bought previous versions o Serif' Draw Plus just because of that (x6 and later on the x8).. strangely enough these are the legacy products of Affinity..

 

On windows i am an old user of the Serif Draw Plus X6 and X8 as well as Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.. so here i am good for auto-trace because the legacy versions support that.. 

However.. on the iPad i have Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer with the exception that i dont have any good tool to auto-trace a raster file (well i have a few but none to be good enough as Draw Plus is).. so yeah... this would be a great addon to the current version of Affinity Designer. I dare to say that i would even pay to have that as a extra plugin.. and i am sure many out there do feel the same..

[AffinityAppMan]

The other issue with Serif' Draw Plus, is that it doesn't work on the MAC.  Having auto-trace in Affinity Designer will take care of everyone.  PC and MAC.

 

[DeezelPower]

I understand and this is a fair point, but like Joao Silva I too have the iPad versions and would be a fantastic addition.

I am just hoping that when we get version 2 of the software things like this are added and also I would not mind paying an upgrade fee, I also understand Affinity are a fairly small company compared to say adobe that’s why patience is sometimes needed.

[Smokestack]

I'm just here to throw in my two cents about hoping for an auto-trace feature for Designer come version 2.0. It's a fairly large deficiency at the moment.

[Christian Southgate]

Another vote for auto-trace. I regularly need to convert the edges of bitmap artwork to vectors for use in cutting machines etc., I was using Inkscape, but I really hate it. I bought Affinity Designer in the sale recently, and gleefully uninstalled Inkscape, never to use it again. When I couldn't find the trace feature in Designer, I searched and found this thread. I am now in the process of re-installing Inkscape. Please Serif, add bitmap curve tracing, and save us from Inkscape hell!

[SrPx]

I use Inkscape also for many other functions...  (configurable spirals, gradient mesh, warp deform, distributing across path, a brilliant super featured inking tool with extremely good response to pressure... ) ... I mean, as much as I agree with many of you on the interface side of it (and not having real CMYK support in a design app!), and as much as Designer is my go-to for everything vectors... I wouldn't see any advantage on uninstalling Inkscape. The export/import among the two as SVG, kind of works. But finally (while I still don't understand people)... you have my vote for autotrace, too. But for a different reason : While I don't have a need for that, and while I love the potrace embedded and improved  thing on Inkscape for that feature, it seems a ton of people here don't, or dislike Inkscape. So, is one of those cost-effective features to add (ie, adding it makes a ton of people happy, hehe). Like when TGA support was improved.

[Last Chance]

I'll also add my vote for Autotrace. I do use CorelDraw but felt that supporting the Affinity team with their excellent 50% off was necessary.

[Ozymandias1972]

18 hours ago, Christian Southgate said:

Another vote for auto-trace. I regularly need to convert the edges of bitmap artwork to vectors for use in cutting machines etc., I was using Inkscape, but I really hate it. I bought Affinity Designer in the sale recently, and gleefully uninstalled Inkscape, never to use it again. When I couldn't find the trace feature in Designer, I searched and found this thread. I am now in the process of re-installing Inkscape. Please Serif, add bitmap curve tracing, and save us from Inkscape hell!

I can understand the frustration and experienced a similar thing. However, there is a workaround and in my case scenario, I used Adobe Capture app for iOS ( on iPhone or iPad ) that you can import an image or take photos of to convert black and white images to SVG format. Export or Airdrop it back into the desktop or open the SVG export on iPad ( Designer app ) from Adobe Capture. Then save the SVG file as the new native Designer format. Just make sure the paths are visible so you can confirm the vector is converted properly. It's not perfect but it works pretty well. 

[Ozymandias1972]

2 hours ago, Last Chance said:

I'll also add my vote for Autotrace. I do use CorelDraw but felt that supporting the Affinity team with their excellent 50% off was necessary.

I'm glad they did the 50% discount because this made it easier for me to purchase Photo to complete the suite I've been building up to transition out of Creative Cloud.

[HuniSenpai]

Let's be honest, they're probably saving auto trace, shapebuilder, and line weight tool for version 2. The guys at Serif have proved that they are excellent software developers capable of solving problems and implementing new features relatively quickly.  These are the main things keeping Designer from being a near perfect software. 

If they give us these features now, what else is there to entice us to upgrade to version 2 when it rolls around? The performance is basically perfect, all other tools are there, and it already beats Adobe Illustrator in a few ways. They already have programmed these features in the past with DrawPlus X8, so they certainly have the skills necessary to program them again.

I do not blame them for putting off these features. I sometimes grow a little worried about Affinity's business model, and if they are going to stay afloat. With such a low price and free updates, it amazes me that they can pay all of these fantastic developers. Some time along the line, they will have to raise their price and get people to buy their products again. And, if version 2 has these features, I will gladly pay $75-$100 for it, especially if it means keeping Serif afloat.

Additionally, I feel confident that they will make my $75-100 well spent. I have no doubt that they will make the auto trace and shapebuilder etc. as good as they can possibly be. Frankly, if I had the money, I would be donating to Serif. Adobe needs competition.

[Ozymandias1972]

16 minutes ago, HuniSenpai said:

Let's be honest, they're probably saving auto trace, shapebuilder, and line weight tool for version 2. The guys at Serif have proved that they are excellent software developers capable of solving problems and implementing new features relatively quickly.  These are the main things keeping Designer from being a near perfect software. 

If they give us these features now, what else is there to entice us to upgrade to version 2 when it rolls around? The performance is basically perfect, all other tools are there, and it already beats Adobe Illustrator in a few ways. They already have programmed these features in the past with DrawPlus X8, so they certainly have the skills necessary to program them again.

I do not blame them for putting off these features. I sometimes grow a little worried about Affinity's business model, and if they are going to stay afloat. With such a low price and free updates, it amazes me that they can pay all of these fantastic developers. Some time along the line, they will have to raise their price and get people to buy their products again. And, if version 2 has these features, I will gladly pay $75-$100 for it, especially if it means keeping Serif afloat.

Additionally, I feel confident that they will make my $75-100 well spent. I have no doubt that they will make the auto trace and shapebuilder etc. as good as they can possibly be. Frankly, if I had the money, I would be donating to Serif. Adobe needs competition.

No doubt about that. I'm sure they've been considering it and hope that it'll happen. It wouldn't surprise me if they roll it out for version 2.0 as they've done a fantastic job with the three apps. Serif deserves to be supported and continue the good work. 

[v_kyr]

26 minutes ago, HuniSenpai said:

If they give us these features now, what else is there to entice us to upgrade to version 2 when it rolls around?

Well honestly I can name and imagine a bunch of still missing things and features here for all Affinity apps, so there will be always enough (plenty) to do for them for the future too. - Regarding vector based autotracing there are a bunch of available alternatives/workarounds, which mostly have been discussed and named before here in the forum. Among all those, the Inkscape build-in Potrace based and enhanced autotracer one, at least gives quality wise very good results, if one spends a little bit time in how to setup and handle it for different tracing purposes. Another advantage is here, that Inkscape has an reusable API and scripting capabilities, so it can be reused as a generator.

[HuniSenpai]

4 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Well honestly I can name and imagine a bunch of still missing things and features here for all Affinity apps, so there will be always enough (plenty) to do for them for the future too. - Regarding vector based autotracing there are a bunch of available alternatives/workarounds, which mostly have been discussed and named before here in the forum. Among all those, the Inkscape build-in Potrace based and enhanced autotracer one, at least gives quality wise very good results, if one spends a little bit time in how to setup and handle it for different tracing purposes. Another advantage is here, that Inkscape has an reusable API and scripting capabilities, so it can be reused as a generator.

Saying that is like saying "Well, this car can't go in reverse, but there's another car that can. Just hop in the other car any time you need to reverse." The whole point of vecotrizing is to offer a quick way to bring an object into vector without tracing. And, yes, I know it is not perfect quality. While Inkscape is an okay program (first vector program I've used, actually) it is sluggish and a pain to use. Honestly, by the time it takes for Inkscape to open, to vectorize, and to export the vector, I could have already traced many simpler paths by hand. If i'm just making an sbubby, it doesn't need to be perfect.

And, to be clear, i'm not saying that aren't minor things that the Affinity suite is missing. There certainly are. But it's the big things that everyone knows about that will convince people to upgrade. As far as I can tell, the big things for Designer are shape builder, vectorizing,  and line width tool. They should and probably will save the smaller things for the free updates. 

[v_kyr]

21 minutes ago, HuniSenpai said:

As far as I can tell, the big things for Designer are shape builder, vectorizing,  and line width tool. They should and probably will save the smaller things for the free updates.

Either that way of update decision methods, or dependent on how time intensive certain feature capabilities are to implement right behaving here. Though everyone (the user base) might have different urgent feature demands at all then here. Beside those you already named, warping, scripting, shape blending/morphing and some better usable/behaving node manipulation (free cut/split, join ...) would be nice to have. Also SVG engine based import/export is far from being stellar usable here and would also benefit from improvements. Let's also add the always essentiell bugs fixing here. - Overall my point was, they will still have enough to work on for some longer times as the products mature.

 

[HuniSenpai]

37 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Either that way of update decision methods, or dependent on how time intensive certain feature capabilities are to implement right behaving here. Though everyone (the user base) might have different urgent feature demands at all then here. Beside those you already named, warping, scripting, shape blending/morphing and some better usable/behaving node manipulation (free cut/split, join ...) would be nice to have. Also SVG engine based import/export is far from being stellar usable here and would also benefit from improvements. Let's also add the always essentiell bugs fixing here. - Overall my point was, they will still have enough to work on for some longer times as the products mature.

 

I agree with those things you listed. I hope they get added. I was just going off of the things I noticed Designer was missing in the order I noticed them -- that's a pretty good indicator of importance. It'll be somewhat different for everyone, of course. For me, it was shapebuilder, vectorizing, and line weight tool. From what I can tell on the forums, these are some of the most common requests. 

I don't think Serif will run out of things to add, but I do think they will run out of big things to add. Big things that would justify an upgrade to version 2.0, 3.0, etc.  

Scripts would be a cool addition, it might be able to let us add missing features to the program until the devs are eventually able to add them properly. 

[JET_Affinity]

12 hours ago, HuniSenpai said:

Saying that is like saying "Well, this car can't go in reverse, but there's another car that can. Just hop in the other car any time you need to reverse."

That is an absolutely false analogy. Is using Illustrator analogous to 'using a car without a reverse' because you have to (egads!) switch to Photoshop in order to edit a raster image?

Auto-tracing is a standalone operation. You do it, and then dink around with the vector results after the fact. You don't auto-trace a raster image, go back and edit the raster image, auto-trace the image again, use other tools to edit the result, rasterize the result, auto-trace it again, ad nauseum. In other words, you don't edit the raster image or the auto-traced results while in the process of running the auto-trace.

There is nothing onerous about switching to a separate utility to run an auto-trace on a raster image, if you must. It's just like using a raster program to create a raster image to your liking, then importing that image into a 3D modeling program to map it to a 3D surface. The 3D modeling program isn't a 'car with no reverse' just because doesn't have its own self-contained raster image editing program.

By your analogy logic, I would have to say that my KTM motorcycle is useless junk because it doesn't have its own built-in pressure washer.

JET

[HuniSenpai]

5 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

That is an absolutely false analogy. Is using Illustrator analogous to 'using a car without a reverse' because you have to (egads!) switch to Photoshop in order to edit a raster image?

Auto-tracing is a standalone operation. You do it, and then dink around with the vector results after the fact. You don't auto-trace a raster image, go back and edit the raster image, auto-trace the image again, use other tools to edit the result, rasterize the result, auto-trace it again, ad nauseum. In other words, you don't edit the raster image or the auto-traced results while in the process of running the auto-trace.

There is nothing onerous about switching to a separate utility to run an auto-trace on a raster image, if you must. It's just like using a raster program to create a raster image to your liking, then importing that image into a 3D modeling program to map it to a 3D surface. The 3D modeling program isn't a 'car with no reverse' just because doesn't have its own self-contained raster image editing program.

By your analogy logic, I would have to say that my KTM motorcycle is useless junk because it doesn't have its own built-in pressure washer.

JET

I absolutely recognize that vecorizing happens essentially once-- you don't keep repeating it. But you are seriously underestimating how long Inkscape takes to open and how long it takes to make a switch between these two programs and export/import the result.

Don't think too far into my analogy, that's literally just one sentence in my post. I'm just trying to say that it is onerous to open inkscape any time I need to vectorize an image. I would argue that Illustrator is missing a large feature because you must switch to Photoshop to edit a raster image -- thankfully, Designer has the pixel persona. 

I'm also a user of Blender, Fusion 360, and Affinity Photo, and I do have to switch between those apps a lot. But there's a reason for that: they do completely different things and are in entire different worlds. I don't expect Affinity Photo to have 3D abilities, and I do not expect Blender to have raster image editing abilities. 

What I am saying is that a car should have the basic features that you expect. Your analogy is broken-- a pressure washer is not something that a motorcycle would be expected to have. I picked the example of a car's reverse because that is a basic feature that is expected on all cars. Evidenced by this entire 12 page thread, there are many, many people who expect a vectorize feature in a vector program. The devs deemed this important, too-- the old DrawPlus X8 had it. I wouldn't be mad if my car was missing heated seats, but I would be if it was missing something as basic as reverse. To many people, vectorizing is a basic vector program feature, and it's missing.

Telling them to go hop in another program is dodging the obvious problem: why not just include a vectorizing feature in Designer in the first place? I know the Affinity team is scared that people will complain that it isn't perfect, but I think the vast majority of us know that vectorizing isn't perfect. Anyone who goes looking for this tool should know what they're getting themselves into.

And, besides, I am fairly confident Serif will add this feature eventually in version 2.0. And I don't mind-- I, and many others, will gladly pay for it is available.

[fde101]

On 4/10/2020 at 1:47 PM, HuniSenpai said:

I know the Affinity team is scared that people will complain that it isn't perfect,

They are not scared, they just don't want to waste time implementing it badly only to turn around and replace it with something better later on.  There are too many other things they can better spend that time on while they are figuring out how to implement a version of the feature that they can be happy with.

[HuniSenpai]

7 hours ago, fde101 said:

They are not scared, they just don't want to waste time implementing it badly only to turn around and replace it with something better later on.  There are too many other things they can better spend that time on while they are figuring out how to implement a version of the feature that they can be happy with.

I don't mean scared literally. I mean it as in concerned; they are concerned that, if they rush it, people will complain & they themselves won't be satisfied, so they will have to do it again. So they understandably want to do it right the first time. But, to be clear, I am not telling them to rush it, I am just saying that they shouldn't go unnecessarily slow on it by trying to make it absolutely perfect because it will never be perfect.

My point is that none of our expectations should be high for vectorizing. We all know it delivers subpar results when compared to tracing by hand. Neither we nor the developers should get their hopes up. While I do have the utmost respect for the devs at Serif, I would be absolutely flabbergasted if they were to make some groundbreaking improvement on vectorizing, something which has remained relatively stagnant for decades. As such, I believe that they should implement it some time in the next year or two, with expectations met, not exceeded -- the latter being nearly impossible.

Edit: also, it's been 6 years. Maybe it would have been better to implement an expectations-met-but-not-exceeded version of vectorizing to tide us over, and then implement an updated version later on. Again, this is why I think they're saving this and other features for version 2.0 (which, if they are doing it for financial reasons, I have no problem with).  

[fde101]

17 minutes ago, HuniSenpai said:

if they were to make some groundbreaking improvement on vectorizing,

I think it is important to distinguish as well between automatic tracing and manually assisted tracing.

There have been some rather strong hints that they intend for tracing to have its own persona: that means a nontrivial user interface for this feature, which suggests that they are looking to do much more than just a click-and-done with a few dropdown or sliders to adjust it.

[HuniSenpai]

11 minutes ago, fde101 said:

I think it is important to distinguish as well between automatic tracing and manually assisted tracing.

There have been some rather strong hints that they intend for tracing to have its own persona: that means a nontrivial user interface for this feature, which suggests that they are looking to do much more than just a click-and-done with a few dropdown or sliders to adjust it.

It would be fantastic for it to have its own persona. I'm still hoping it comes in version 2.0, though. While I recognize that this kind of thing takes a while, 6 years is quite a long time to wait for a vectorizing feature in a vector program. On an unrelated note, I also hope they get around to adding shapebuilder in this next version.  There are a few things in Designer that have been missing for so long that my only explanation is that they're waiting for version 2.0. I have my fingers crossed; if it doesn't come in version 2.0, then we might have to wait another 6 years.