# Quality: From Raster to Vector

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/quality-from-raster-to-vector/635657>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 24, 2012, 7:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/quality-from-raster-to-vector/635657 "2012-09-24T07:07:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![by-tor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/by-tor/32/266_2.png) [@by-tor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/by-tor)\
**Post date:** [September 24, 2012, 7:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/quality-from-raster-to-vector/635657/1 "2012-09-24T07:07:59Z")

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My question is simple: if you use 3rd party software to convert a rasterized image file to a vector image file, will the resultant quality be good enough for commercial print media?

In this case, consider Illustrator to be off limits.

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**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\
**Post date:** [September 24, 2012, 7:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/quality-from-raster-to-vector/635657/2 "2012-09-24T07:41:39Z")

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There’s no hard and fast answer to this.

I’ve converted some raster images to vector in Inkscape and found the result to be surprisingly good when scaled up - in other cases, the result has looked blobby and weird.

It depends on the characteristics of the image - factors such as contrast, depth of field/focus, general ‘quality’ of the picture and even the subject material (a field of flowers, for example, may vectorise more comfortably than a portrait of a person)

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**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\
**Post date:** [September 24, 2012, 8:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/quality-from-raster-to-vector/635657/3 "2012-09-24T08:30:55Z")

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It also depends on the skill of the editor - my wife uses Inkscape (free) to produce cutting paths for craft projects. She Google’s images and then turns them into a vector path using the Trace tool. Some of her edits are really good (Disney characters for our photo albums, and logos for other places we have visited). She just has a good eye and trims and simplifies the nodes. But you have to be careful and she isn’t scaling the image to a huge size. YMMV.