Lazyweb: Bitmap to Vector?
Since it appears I'll be living with my current laptop for a while longer, I'm going to go ahead and get it laser etched. I've wanted this woodcut on the front for a while now, but I haven't been able to find any programs which can properly turn those cuts into vectors. A friend gave me an old Adobe program that worked well, except the vectors came out with lots of solid white areas, too, instead of being the sort of monotone vectors that a laser inscribing machine can actually understand.
Any ideas?
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I found this tool a few weeks ago - maybe it would work for you?
http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/
Vector Magic FTW!
Oh, and to save you the time and effort of running it yourself (it takes an age as it's quite a complex image, and it needed some fudging with the settings to get a reasonable result) you can find a vectorised version here:
http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/vctr/vctr_flex?g=1103980&k=Y52X2G0e6OxmlnCs&p=g
It would probably benefit from some pre-processing in Photoshop/GIMP/whatever to remove the noise, increase the contrast, etc., but it's come out pretty well. The text at the top is completely broken, but without a higher resolution source there's not a lot that can be done about that...
autotrace
I use Delineate on a Mac. It hasn't been updated in something like a millenium, but it's pretty good. The colour tracing with AutoTrace is reasonable, and the B&W tracing with potrace is brilliant. Both need some tweaking of knobs and cleaning up in a vector editor to get desired results, but they do what I need. Oh, and the re-draw time is crap.
The other one I remember was the old trace function on Corel Draw, which did pretty well from memory. Shame it's not really around these days...
actually, the font at the top looks pretty cool when you zoom in. It sure isn't readable in any traditional sense, but kinda looks like an alien alphabet when you zoon in on the vectored results.
That looks pretty good, El Biggus, but it lost a lot of the detail work that makes it so cool. Still, I'll play around with it. Thanks for the suggestion(s), everybody!
Here's a vectorization which preserves the top text a lot better: http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/vctr/vctr_flex?g=1104121&k=1e5r0tU3zNs66wjZ&p=g
You know...Felipe Li could have helped out a lot with this.
It's going to be tough to retain that intensive amount of detail converting raster to vector. Like the other user said, high contrast is crucial, as is a high enough resolution source.
I believe I've used the adobe product you mentioned, and I don't ever recall having any amount of luck with it. After a while I simply traced by hand in illustrator. I agree, however, that any hand editing of this image to vector graphics is almost too time consuming to be worthwhile.
However, if you felt like bathing your computer in tar and dipping it in sulfuric acid, it'd make a hell of an acid-resist etching. :)
I don't know what laser engraver you're planning on using, but the Epilog machines do just fine with raster images.
The other one I remember was the old trace function on Corel Draw, which did pretty well from memory. Shame it's not really around these days...
The Corel auto-trace function was awesome. You could set it to look for things of a certain thickness and then it would find the line in the center. Required a fair amount of cleanup, but it was cleanup from a decent original.
I suspect I know exactly what Joel means by "the vectors came out with lots of solid white areas" -- like that dark area on the Rhino's butt, right? It doesn't come out as a series of crosshatched lines scratching out a darkened area, but as an outline of the dark area, right? Sadly, I don't think anyone has automated that aspect of digitizing woodcuts; you have to go in and correct it by hand.
That woodcut rules, you better post a pic when it's done. :)
The Adobe product you mentioned is called Streamline - and now is integrated into Illustrator as Auto Trace...
The Stanford product is the best one I have seen...
if you get a digital artist who is good with Bezier curves / vector drawing, you can get them to clean up the automatic tracing for you. And heck, in this day of Web 2.0, they can use a little PAID work.
But yah, a lot of the lasers out there do even better with bitmap images...
There's a adobe illustrator version over here: http://vektordb.lafkon.net/index.php?id=132
Sadly I can't open AI files so I can't say if it is any good. (found on wikipedia)
That Illustrator version doesn't have nearly enough detail. I just took a look at it.
I'm actually down to pay someone to take one of the Vector Magic attempts and clean them up. Is there a good place to put an ad for something like that up besides eLance or Craigslist?
Someone at CNCzone discussed using Inkscape. I installed it, and my five minute review suggest that it kicks butt. Looks like it will import bitmaps, jpg, and a variety of other formats then let you adjust the picture and convert to a path and save as .svg or .dxf.
I have a little Sherline CNC milling machine and like the .dxf export. ACE converter will turn the .dxf into a toolpath and I can engrave the picture.
Here's a link to a vectormagic sample that retains almost all the detail:
http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/vctr/vctr_flex?g=1106944&k=6ljKFhsBJ2CCcZDy&p=g
Unfortunately, vectormagic has a limit to how big the images can be, so I could only fit the head.
Basically, you take the original. Bring it into photoshop and make it grayscale. Raise the resolution really high. (between 600 - 1200ppi) Then, unsharp mask until you get something that's not too jaggy, not too blurry. Then convert that into a bitmap using 50% threshold.
That's the file you bring into the vectorizing software. Try saving it as a png.
Of course, a higher resolution original would help.
-Babbington
I like laser etching and would love to see the finished product, but this discussion has just brought home to me the paradox of "progress."
We have a dozen or more people from around the world spending time and cutting-edge technology to approximate the results of what was originally the work of one guy with a knife and a block of wood.
What about hand-digitizing it? Would take some time but would honor the effort the old master put into it, probably add some character which would be lost via digitization and would guarantee WYSIWYG outcome.
More importantly, did JWZ actually create the term and concept of "Lazyweb" on his blog, or did he, in fact, copy from someone else?
I think I've got a version that will work, thanks to some people who took the time to send in versions. I'll keep you guys updated on the progress!
Even back in the heyday of Streamline, its output was never as good as what you could get in Photoshop from a high-res scan. Change the file to black and white, bump up the levels to get high contrast, select the black areas with the magic wand and make a work path from the selection at the tightest tolerance. Export that path to Illustrator, and while it may look like what Streamline put out, it's got a lot more detail.
The white areas in your original vector file could have been removed by making compound paths out of the overlapping areas. Depending on what (ancient) version of Streamline you were working with, that maybe should have happened automatically.
I'm amazed at what VectorMagic can do, and for free! I almost can't wait until the next time some client sends me a crappy scan when I ask for a vector version of their logo!
I'm not sure where you live, but in the Chinatown near where I live (Nagasaki) there's a guy who will hand engrave whatever you want onto whatever you want. My friend had his cellphone touched up with discreet bamboo.
I'm not sure if you could find such cellphone-centric artists outside of Japan, but it's probably just a step away from the 'your name written in fantasy creatures' people you see on the streets in New York or San Francisco. Of course, laser etching would be a safer bet for quality, but what that man can do in 5 minutes while you wait angrily outside of his stall is amazing.
Anyone in Austin want to laser etch theirs? We're setting up a new business and will be at SXSW this year. Sweet.
Check out the following link for a great selection...
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/bitmaptovector/Bitmap_to_Vector_Conversion_Tracing_Software_Raster_to_Vector.htm