So for the purposes of creating some merchandise for a podcast, we need to provide a logo we have in a vector graphic format.
I’ve currently got the logo in a jpg format.
Is there anyway to do a simple conversion from jpg to vector?
I have downloaded both Gimp2 and Inkscape, and had a play around with them, but couldn’t find an option to do a conversion. I’m presuming simply doing a ‘Save As’ and changing it to a vector extension won’t actually do the trick?
Illustrator can do this, after a fashion.
There is no such thing as a “simple conversion” from JPEG to vector; JPEG is a raster image format, which means that it describes an image as a grid of pixels. Vector formats, on the other hand, store mathematical representations of shapes that make up an image, which makes them excellent for storing simple images (like logos) that need to be scalable to any size.
The best you can get is software that looks at a raster image (like a JPEG) and tries to create shapes that “fit” the regions of color in the image. The result is very rarely much good; extensive fine tuning is usually required, to the extent that you might be better off just re-creating the image by hand in a vector graphics program yourself.
That said, Inkscape does have this capability; it’s under Path->Trace Bitmap. If your image is really simple, it might just produce an acceptable result. 
VectorMagic is by far the most impressive conversion thing I’ve seen, easily beating out Illustrator. It won’t be as clean as a manual trace, but depending your needs, that may not be necessary.
They also offer (pricier) hand-tracing if you need it.
Inkscape does the job pretty well, in my experience - the main problem is that jpeg is probably about the worst possible starting point, because of the noise that the compression introduces - there’s a fair chance that the trace algorithm will see some of the compression artefacts as actual features of the image and the traced result may be perturbed by them.
Inkscape also has a ‘simplify’ function that might help to remove some of the unwanted noise in the traced result, but this might also remove some desired details.
If the size of the file is too small or there being much fine detail, you’ll likely get lousy results.
In almost every case, a logo was created via some kind of vector program. Is it impossible to get a copy of the original vector file? I’ve also gone to lengths such as checking brandsoftheworld.com and occasionally have had luck searching for PDFs the company has put out and extracting a vector logo from it.
GreedySmurf, would you mind posting the logo in question if you haven’t found a solution yet? I’m no expert, but I work at a print shop and have a few years of experience recreating logos. I’d like to at least take a look at it.
Sure.
These are links to my Photobucket account.
There are actually three different images we are considering using for a logo for a Podcast, myself and my co-host produce about Bloodbowl.
But when we decide on the one to use, we want to able to print the image onto a range of merchadnise of varying sizes, including trophies, and a dice face.
I haven’t tried any of the suggestions in this thread yet. That’ll have to wait until I get home tonight.
Thanks TheScogg for any assistance.
To give you an idea, here are some samples from VectorMagic (mentioned above). It’s online, automatic, and free for the first two conversions:
Transmitter
Player
That’s amazing quality in the conversion!!
Thanks!!
Pretty neat, huh? It caused a minor stir when it came out a few years ago. It started out as a research demo that anybody could use with no restrictions (ah, the good ol’ days) but then they decided to commercialize it. Can’t blame 'em, really, but it’s still pretty affordable anyway.
Wow. Color me impressed! That’s miles ahead of what I would have expected for a completely un-tweaked conversion.
I’m sure you’d get similar results from autotrace (a program I use often and which has already been mentioned here). The transmitter logo has just two colours and is very simple.
It looks like the transmitter logo may have been originally designed as a vector graphic. Is it not possible to contact the original artist and ask for the original files?
Judge for yourself: Transmitter comparison image using Vector Magic, Illustrator, and Autotrace
Illustrator was manually tweaked because none of the presets were very good. VM and Autotrace were left on default settings.
Pay attention to the stars and the letters.
Possibly. I believe my co-host purchased it from istockphoto, but I’m not sure if one of the download options was as a vector and whether you can go back and download it again in a different format? He’s supposed to be checking that out for us.
Of course there is: Convert the raster image to a vector image composed of little colored boxes, one colored box per pixel in the raster image. Done.
(Thus we learn the difference between “simple” and “good”.)
And that is actually used when you want to make a pixelated sprite in a vector image (like, for example, when you are showing a sprite from an old video game on something that needs to be able to be resized to any resolution.)
I came in today to post this same OP. Noting this thread is 3 years old, I’ll ask “is the info still current?” Is Vectormagic still the best way to covert my .jpeg logo into a .ai vector?
I use Illustrator’s Live Trace for all of my raster-to-vector linework conversion needs, but as far as a free tool, I’m sure it can’t be beat.
Give it a shot.
