Best Image Vectorizer for Mac with Affinity Designer

[firstdefence]

Original

Vector Magic SVG

Leafy Leaves - Vector Magic.svg

All the images are from Pixabay 

[catlover]

Very nice indeed.

Alas.... my pension doesn't allow such expenditure : ( US$ 295,- )

Either before or after Brexit   .

 

[v_kyr]

9 hours ago, DebbieK said:

...Image Vectorizer app gives a nice result for me... but when i export it (svg, pdf or eps) and drag the exported file onto my affinity designer project I can't see the vectors... ie no nodes or handles to modify... Im a newbie to Affinity Designer so it might be that I'm not getting it... when i click on the layer with the 'vectorised' drawing from Image Vectoriser, convert to curves is greyed out... so its not that... any ideas please ...

See the Node tool vs Move tool here in the online help files...

• About lines, curves and shapes
• Edit vector shapes and curves

[v_kyr]

6 hours ago, catlover said:

Very nice indeed.

Alas.... my pension doesn't allow such expenditure : ( US$ 295,- )

Either before or after Brexit   .

 

SV v.1.7 (€ 1,99) some longer time ago in the Mac App store, it's nowadays probably replaced by SV2 ...

... other above mentioned tools are free instead.

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, figety said:

I have been using vector programs for several years with excellent results...     I would be very happy to convert any raster image to a vector file at a price...  Try me  : )

I attached a famous cartoon character that has been recently vectorized...    

Try it in Affinity and see how nice it looks...

Your PDF looks like it was created by one of the apps that vectorizes pixel images ... & even though it is a simple image with few colors & constant line weights, it is a good example of why I (& I suspect quite a few others) usually end up doing a manual tracing instead.

To see why, consider that I might want to change the angle of the feet, like the character was standing on tiptoes; or change his stance so the character was crouching a bit as if he was preparing to jump; or just changing the shape of the overalls & nearby torso to make the character look a bit more rotund; or to make the eyes look different like if one was winking; or any of a dozen other changes.

For things like that, the various items need to be separate objects, each with its own modifiable stroke width, & often with a nested group hierarchy to make those changes simple. IOW, the vectorization algorithm needs to be 'smart' enough to do more than just detect edges. It also needs to 'see' the image as humans do, recognizing that shoes, legs, faces, & so on are discrete objects & may consist of several different parts.

Consider also more complex pixel images, for example those with many different things humans would consider to be separate objects, the shadows or other lighting effects they would create, the dozens of different colors or tints that would have to be preserved when changing their positions, etc.

I know of no app at any price that can even begin to do that kind of 'smart' object-aware vectorization, & while I could do it myself or pay others to do it for me, the cost in time & money invariably makes manual tracing the better option.

Of course, YMMV -- it all depends on the end use.

[DebbieK]

Thanks everyone for all your helpful advice

I'm a convert to Intaglio's Vectoriser tool... It works great for me on my pen & ink sketches

Vector Magic looks awesome too... but yes a bit expensive for now!

[postmadesign]

For plain B/W graphic, I can recommend the convertio.co convertor website. It can convert almost anything, also huge files, and does a pretty handy job.

I tried many of the apps mentioned (except vector magic, which is really only for power users, way to expensive for casual use) and they are all rather meh. Super Vectorizer 2 is OK, but it seems to downgrade the input before creating a vector trace. So when I use my 1200 dpi huge B/W scans it creates a lower resolution graphic which it then traces. This is far from ideal. Intaglio Vectorize is better in this respect, but it produces very many nodes, especially on diagonal lines. Also both these programs have a flattened graphic as output (one curves layer) which is really annoying if you want to edit the graphic (f.i. with letterforms, alphabets, symbols). Convertio.co does a better job in this respect too.

I am not sure about greyscale or color photos. as I never use vector tracing for this, as it produces quite awful results most of the time. A 3 color logo in a decent resolution did not do too badly in SV2, though there are some issues with the separation of colors, which require some postprocessing.

[v_kyr]

58 minutes ago, postmadesign said:

I am not sure about greyscale or color photos. as I never use vector tracing for this, as it produces quite awful results most of the time. A 3 color logo in a decent resolution did not do too badly in SV2, though there are some issues with the separation of colors, which require some postprocessing.

For color tracing it always depends how the input/source bitmap is handled here. For example Potrace, which is used by Inkscape, usually doesn't support color images and initially can only handle 1-Bit (b&w) image output. Though with some tweaking it's possible to extract individual color components from a color image first, trace them separately, and then overlay the resulting pieces together to get a multicolored destination vector color image.

That's what Inkscape does, it handles color images via color quantization or multiple scanning here. Other tools like SV seem to do the same, since that gives you a bunch of stacked color layers as a result. The above mentioned Intaglio Vectoriser tool uses build-in color selection and layers to offer this processing in a manual by the user setup fashion. Other tracers like Autotrace do handle color tracing directly, but with giving mixed quality results.

[lepr]

.

[Alfred]

42 minutes ago, >|< said:

.

 If you post a message and then have second thoughts about it, you can use the ‘Options’ link below the posted message to access the ‘Hide’ option. Choosing that option will cause your post to be hidden from everybody except the moderators.

[albertkinng]

On 3/19/2019 at 2:45 PM, firstdefence said:

A few examples of Vector Magic on automatic

It doesn't matter how good it is if the price is stupidly high! $300 dollars! You have to be kidding me! 

[firstdefence]

7 hours ago, albertkinng said:

It doesn't matter how good it is if the price is stupidly high! $300 dollars! You have to be kidding me! 

It depends if, what you are doing and the productivity increase that will potentially earn you that cost back and then start earning you a profit but I absolutely agree $300 is a lot of money. 

If usage is occasional, then the price is simply not worth it. I bought it for a large batch job and on that one job, it paid for itself, everything after that is cash in my pocket.

 

The app isn't perfect and oftentimes it needs careful attention to get the best out of it but quality in gets quality out and same goes for versa. The interface could be better/nicer looking, it looks like a ex-windows programmer has designed it but aesthetics aside, I really don't care as long as it functions to the best of it's abilities. 

  

[albertkinng]

20 hours ago, firstdefence said:

the price is simply not worth it

You said it.

[firstdefence]

2 hours ago, albertkinng said:

You said it.

Worth it for me, but not worth it for you.