Vector art conversion

[sheriffderek]

+1 on this.

 

Now that developers can use SVG site-wide, this is a necessity. I had planned on switching to Affinity, but seem to need this on every project. Hand lettering, drawing conversion to lines etc.

[Sarvasri]

For now, I'm liking Vector Magic online. For $8/mo. you can do unlimited and cancel until you need it again. No way to pretest Super Vectorizer that I know of. I don't do this daily so it works for me.

 

This is what I was working with. Top is the bitmap original scan by someone else (10+ years ago) of a pencil drawing. It's small and doesn't enlarge well at all. Bottom is the medium detail version from Vector Magic online unedited. Over the years I've tried Illustrator and several other vector trace apps on it, none were very good. This one I like.

 

 

I took your raster image on top into Inkscape to see if I could replicate the quality of VectorMagic on the bottom. It was not too difficult. I just selected grayscale tracing.

 

The result was as good or better. So for now, Inkscape will be my tool of choice for auto-tracing until Affinity can come up with something better, which I'm sure they will be able to do considering the quality of their work so far. Note that on the Mac you will need to change the X11 preferences not to copy to the Mac clipboard so that you can paste an SVG image into a separate document to save. It only takes a few seconds to copy a selection in Inkscape to a new document to save it. Copy and paste directly into Affinity Designer won't work from Inkscape directly due to the Mac clipboard and X11 limitations. You need to save an Inkscape SVG doc then import it into AD to get true editable traces, instead of a bitmap.

 

I would post my result here, but I can't figure out how to upload it in the editor. I don't have the image online with a URL. The editor here doesn't seem to have an upload feature.

[crgshell]

I can't believe you don't have convert to vector tool! This is so basic! I keep running into roadblocks over and over with this software!

[R C-R]

I can't believe you don't have convert to vector tool! This is so basic! I keep running into roadblocks over and over with this software!

It may seem basic to you but there is nothing straightforward or simple about the actual process.

 

Consider what this involves: the app has to analyze all the pixels of the source file & determine what represent edges that should be converted to vector paths. In a document with millions of pixels, many of which will have almost but not quite the same colors, some sort of algorithmic threshold to determine where an edge transitions occur must be established -- if every group of pixels of the same exact color was converted to a filled path, the result could be the creation of tens of thousands of tiny vector shapes.

 

For the same reason, some sort of area based path smoothing algorithm needs to be used to reduce the number of nodes per shape to a reasonable number.

 

If either algorithm's threshold is set too high, accuracy will suffer; if too low, enormous files will be generated that will be hard to edit. Ideally, all the algorithms would be adaptive & interactive, somehow modeling human vision closely enough to determine area by area when creation of more nodes & shapes would not produce any perceptible visual improvements.

 

This is kind of optimization is not easy even for high contrast pixel line art; for a typical photograph with thousands of low contrast edge transitions it would be a formidable task, particularly if the conversion process is required to complete in a reasonable amount of time on more than the most powerful systems available.

[moebis]

@R C-R: Understood. However, I think the point we're all trying to make is that these techniques have been around for a very long time. CorelDRAW from 1994 running on Windows 3.1 could do tracing. There are small one man shops that offer vector tracing software on the App Store. With all the amazing things the Affinity devs have done in Photo and Designer, this should be a piece of cake for them. Maybe it's just a prioritization thing. If enough of us say "Please add this!" then it will find it's way into the software. For line art software, it's kinda a must really.

[R C-R]

Being around for a long time does not in itself make the techniques any easier to implement if a good balance between accuracy & file complexity is a primary goal.

 

I have not used CorelDraw but I have used several of the stand alone apps & downloaded quite a few free vector documents from various web sites that obviously were created by software that automatically traced bitmaps. They often look very good but on inspection their node counts & the number of vector shapes used is ridiculously high, far more than even a semi-skilled user would need to manually trace the same image.

 

As has been mentioned several times, I think the Affinity developers are looking for something substantially better than what the existing tracers can do, much closer to what a skilled user could produce manually.

[gdenby]

FWIW, Illustrator was in its 9th version before it had an acceptable auto trace. Corel Draw was in its 3rd version before it added the trace module. If my memory serves, it only handled 1 bit graphics, and only later had a threshold option for greyscale.

[v_kyr]

Passing through autotrace with default settings here ...

• 

...if one would prepare the fuzzy input image instead slightly and finetune the tracers settings accordingly, you can get good results even with common old freeware tracing apps.

 

[Hokusai]

FWIW, Illustrator was in its 9th version before it had an acceptable auto trace. Corel Draw was in its 3rd version before it added the trace module. If my memory serves, it only handled 1 bit graphics, and only later had a threshold option for greyscale.

gdenby,

 

You are close but Illustrator was actually in its 12th version before it had the ability to vectorize raster art.The first version of Illustrator to do that was CS 2 (released in 2005) and Illustrator was first released in 1987 so it took them 18 years to add it. Streamline was Adobe's application (sold separately of course) that was originally designed to vectorize images was released in 1989 until it was incorporated into Illustrator in CS 2. The lame thing was, Illustrator's live trace functions weren't new or different from Streamline at all. It wasn't until CS 3 in 2007 that they actually added to and improved upon Streamline's functions. I'm not a Corel fan and while I've used CorelDraw I don't know much about it or its history but I agree with the point you are trying to make, adding a vectorizer isn't an easy task and it isn't a "basic" tool as crgshell has claimed. 

 

Hokusai

[R C-R]

...if one would prepare the fuzzy input image instead slightly and finetune the tracers settings accordingly, you can get good results even with common old freeware tracing apps.

Judging by your example, the autotrace output with default settings lacks quite a bit of detail in some parts of the image, particularly around the engine & suspension, the rider's arm, & parts of the face. No doubt you could improve it by experimenting with different settings, but this can become quite tedious & time consuming depending on what is considered acceptable for a particular use.

 

In this respect it is similar to other freeware & modestly priced conversion utilities I have tried -- it is not really very "automatic," often requiring a lot of trial & error to get reasonably good results. And if it is like the ones I have tried, retaining much detail invariably results in very high node counts, which makes editing anything difficult.

 

Although I have not bought into it so I can't comment on how well it controls node counts, the only app of this type I am aware of that has a reputation for mostly avoiding these issues is Vector Magic (see their probably biased & self-serving comparison page here) but to use it you either have to subscribe to the online service for ~$8 per month or buy the desktop version for $300, which has more features.

[v_kyr]

Honestly it's somehow the same here like how images are processed from a cam, is their output always pretty fine with the default settings and cam automatics? - If so you wouldn't need any RAW converters or bitmap apps for finetuning and altering the images at all. It's IMO the same with drawn bitmaps and these things here, not every raster input image file or drawing is in a perfect state for scanning/tracing by default and most tracing apps do therefor also have settings here for telling and applying to their algorithms how some input should be specifically handled and processed.

 

I never tried or used that Vector Magic program, so I can't say, but maybe it first does some stronger auto analysis and optimization of the supplied raster input images, applying contrast, denoise filtering and some sharpening routines etc., before it's tracing engine performs the overall vectorizing process. That's something most opensource apps don't do automatically here, they just use mean values as default and thus you have to adjust some of these things then by urging on your own via manual applying options and settings to them.

[R C-R]

My point is that there is quite a bit of difference between a so-called automatic tracing app that has half a dozen or more often arcane settings users must tweak manually to get reasonably good results & one that applies sophisticated algorithms to determine near optimal settings on an image by image basis & provides easy to understand & use adjustments.

 

Vector Magic seems to be one of the few attempting to apply this much more difficult approach, & judging by the online 'try before you subscribe' option it is only partially successful at that.

 

I suspect the Affinity developers want to offer something that surpasses Vector Magic in this respect, is much more affordable, & have some ideas about how to do that. 

[v_kyr]

Yes there are generally differences between such apps here and how they overall work, most are less user friendly in terms of an easy automatic handling, since it is also much more effort and more difficult to apply sophisticated good working algorithms for auto image detection and analysis etc. Some tools even don't support vectorized color output.

 

Further, most common tools I've seen here (even some commercial ones), are just reusing internally older tracing engines to some degree. Or the other way expressed, most are often (strictly speaking) finally just frontends or GUIs which are placed around of some older opensource tracing tools and libraries here, some with additional import/export format support by reusing some common known conversion libs.

 

Well I don't know what the Affinity developers have on their mind here, or what their desired standard to aim after is or will be for a possible tracing support. - I even don't know if they plan at all to embed some auto tracing support.

[moebis]

Here is an almost 20 year old open source project: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/index.html#intro

 

There is also an app on the App Store called Super Vectorizer, that started out of a one man shop. This isn't tough. There are so many image processing libraries, I wouldn't be surprised to find out there is even example code for Xcode and swift to do this. My point is, even if it's basic B&W shape tracing, it would be a very welcome value add to any vector based drawing application. Affinity Designer should have this built-in as a core feature.

[v_kyr]

...

For more information please check the following thread: JPEG, bitmap, tracing to covert to vector

 

In the meantime I've seen that MEB already had pointed to a thread which discusses the theme of Affinity tracing support.

 

 

 

Here is an almost 20 year old open source project: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/index.html#intro

 

There is also an app on the App Store called Super Vectorizer, that started out of a one man shop. This isn't tough. There are so many image processing libraries, I wouldn't be surprised to find out there is even example code for Xcode and swift to do this. My point is, even if it's basic B&W shape tracing, it would be a very welcome value add to any vector based drawing application. Affinity Designer should have this built-in as a core feature.

 

Well of course there is example code for tracing algorithms etc. since all that stuff has been used years before in vector based applications, font tools and so on. But as you said, a lot of these projects are old and so is their underlayed algorithm codebase. Meaning here, 20 years later there should be slightly better knowledge about tracing algorithms, the quality and standards should have raized here, or at least peoples expectations in this domain.

 

I think AD will have one day also an autotracing option build in, since it is something which makes general sense to have here too in contrast to the competition.

[R C-R]

moebis,

 

I have Super Vectorizer 2. It has all the problems I mentioned earlier -- arcane settings & sliders that give you very little idea of how much they will affect the accuracy of the output, zero documentation, a tendency to produce an excessive number of vectors with thousands of nodes to achieve reasonably good looking results, etc. I bought it on sale for substantially under $10 & I am not even sure it is worth that price.

 

I have done a few experiments with simple B&W & greyscale drawings. After fiddling with the settings to get a good looking trace that retained all the important details of the image, which typically took as much as 20 minutes, I opened the output SVGs in Affinity Designer & hand tweaked each vector to remove unneeded nodes. It was not unusual for there to be dozens or hundreds of clusters of lots of sharp nodes that could be replaced with one or two smooth nodes that actually was a more faithful representation of the original raster art.

 

This was tedious, time consuming work. It took over an hour just to clean up the most obvious areas, & several more to do a really thorough job. And in case anyone is wondering, yes, I also tried various ways of pre-processing the originals, like adding a small amount of blur, boosting contrast, or reducing the originals' pixel dimensions. This adding quite a bit more time to the experiments & in the end did not make much of a difference.

 

The result of all this work was a reduction in file sizes from around 2X to as much as 5X, & better looking documents that were more faithful to the originals.

 

But there were still problems in how the vectors were grouped & layered that made it very difficult to edit anything if say, I wanted to change the position of a cartoon figure's hand or change a facial expression or add another object. Fixing that was even more tedious & time consuming.

 

To complete the experiment, I did manual tracings in AD, using the original raster images as templates. In almost every respect, even though I am not particularly fast at this sort of thing, the manually traced versions were better looking, far more editable, & took much less time to produce.

 

So as far as I am concerned, adding something like this to AD would add almost no value to the product.

[moebis]

moebis,

 

I have Super Vectorizer 2. It has all the problems I mentioned earlier -- arcane settings & sliders that give you very little idea of how much they will affect the accuracy of the output, zero documentation, a tendency to produce an excessive number of vectors with thousands of nodes to achieve reasonably good looking results, etc. I bought it on sale for substantially under $10 & I am not even sure it is worth that price.

 

I have done a few experiments with simple B&W & greyscale drawings. After fiddling with the settings to get a good looking trace that retained all the important details of the image, which typically took as much as 20 minutes, I opened the output SVGs in Affinity Designer & hand tweaked each vector to remove unneeded nodes. It was not unusual for there to be dozens or hundreds of clusters of lots of sharp nodes that could be replaced with one or two smooth nodes that actually was a more faithful representation of the original raster art.

 

This was tedious, time consuming work. It took over an hour just to clean up the most obvious areas, & several more to do a really thorough job. And in case anyone is wondering, yes, I also tried various ways of pre-processing the originals, like adding a small amount of blur, boosting contrast, or reducing the originals' pixel dimensions. This adding quite a bit more time to the experiments & in the end did not make much of a difference.

 

The result of all this work was a reduction in file sizes from around 2X to as much as 5X, & better looking documents that were more faithful to the originals.

 

But there were still problems in how the vectors were grouped & layered that made it very difficult to edit anything if say, I wanted to change the position of a cartoon figure's hand or change a facial expression or add another object. Fixing that was even more tedious & time consuming.

 

To complete the experiment, I did manual tracings in AD, using the original raster images as templates. In almost every respect, even though I am not particularly fast at this sort of thing, the manually traced versions were better looking, far more editable, & took much less time to produce.

 

So as far as I am concerned, adding something like this to AD would add almost no value to the product.

 

Not all of us are perfectionists like you R C-R. Sometimes we need a quick and dirty method to scale a lo-res bitmap icon or something. I don't think there is a dispute here about this being a value add for a large portion of AD users. Just because you don't see any value doesn't mean there isn't any. There is a reason why this has been a staple feature in most vector art programs for the past 20 years. Unnecessary nodes? Yes, I know, I use Vector Magic, and although it's really good, it's not perfect, but I don't need perfect, I need a fast workflow. Thanks for your experience and feedback though. ;-) 

[R C-R]

Not all of us are perfectionists like you R C-R.

I am in no way a perfectionist. The point of my experiments just to compare how long it would take to get reasonably good results using an existing, affordable auto-trace app vs. manual tracing. My conclusion was that these "quick & dirty" solutions are considerably more dirty & far less quick that they have been touted to be, so while they may have some limited value in a few usage scenarios, they are far from ideal for most work. That is in large part because they are still based on the same algorithms developed 20+ years ago, with a few bells & whistles like color capabilities tacked on to make them seem more modern.

 

So yes, Affinity could probably add a similar quick & dirty auto-tracing feature to Designer without too much difficulty, but it likely would be a disappointment to most of the user base. Besides, since the development team is small & there are already a lot of yet to be implemented features on the roadmap, I would much rather see them concentrate on that, which I believe would add much more value than a "me too" implementation of something that is already available for free or at little cost from other sources.

[sheriffderek]

I'm happy to just use Illustrator for this purpose.

However, just to give a real-world example (checking back into this 5 years later) - while I'm thinking about it - here it is.

I have this illustrator friend who is a BIT stubborn. He wouldn't draw with a Wacom - or anything digital, but I'm using the illustrations as SVG and controlling their color in a web document with CSS (Example). So - for that reason, I can't just ink it. It wouldn't maintain his style. He also wouldn't like someone else to go over his drawing. Now, 2020 - he's finally got an iPad - and he tried pro-create - but now wont try anything else (clearly - fixing him - would be easier than adding the 'trace to object' type feature). So, from pro-create - he's not giving me vector. It spits out layers of png - and then I have to put those in illustrator + programmatically trace them + and then put them in layers + and manually amend the SVG code for my CSS. I just wanted a real use case somewhere in this thread.

I understand that it's a complex process - but I also think that there's a use-case for a less complex version. How many people are image tracing things other than line drawings? Would 1 color tracing be any different. I can just use illustrator. Not a huge problem for me. I'll take some perspective tools over this any day.

[Ink311]

On 2/13/2015 at 9:22 AM, sparky said:

I need to be able to convert raster art and convert it into vector art in an EPS format.  I need to be able to take in jpeg, giff, psd, pdf and other traditional raster art formats and convert and export the art into a vector art EPS format.  My clients need to put their logo on pens, cups and other things.  Accordingly it is important that I can supply them with vector art.  I know this can be done in Adobe Illustrator.  They have an Auto Trace option that works well.  My question is . . . Can this be done with Affinity Designer?  Thank you for your help in this matter.

I truly feel your pain. Affinity really need to add this feature I purchased the product thinking I could totally get away from Adobe. I am a vinyl installer and designer, I have been using a free app Image Vectorizer. It has some limited features but usually I can get something to work with. If they can offer it for absolutely free Affinity needs to integrate a professional version of this tool. Some crud examples attached hope this can help you!

WestMinster Village.eps WestMinster Village.eps

[moebis]

On 7/7/2015 at 12:57 PM, MEB said:

@moebis, @dazzyweb,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

This was already discussed in several threads. We are considering to add a tracing tool to Affinity (eventually as a new persona) but it must be good enough to meet our  standards. This is not a trivial task/feature and may take some time until we get it as we want. Serif Drawplus codebase is totally different from Affinity's code. They are not compatible and the software requirements are also different. Affinity line of products are geared towards the professional market.

For more information please check the following thread: JPEG, bitmap, tracing to covert to vector

Have we figured out how to include bitmap tracing tools in Affinity Designer yet? It's been 8 years now.