Best way to ‘vectorize’ an image

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Posted By
gtg582q
Nov 9, 2005
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I have a piece I’m working on and the whole thing I made as vectors. There’s one part I didn’t make a vector because the pen tool does some funny things (making a tree). So I took a tree, cropped it, pasted it and did a color overlay of black so it’s all one color and essentially looks like a vector tree. However, there are some rough edges all around it that kill the illusion of vector – what’s the best way to smooth these edges to give the impression it’s a vector. I tried a small radius of gaussian blur but you can tell it’s blurred a little. Any advice on smoothing it better?

P.S. I’m not looking for lectures on how photoshop can’t make ‘true vectors’ with the pen tool. I know photoshop rasterizes images not vectorizes. All this I know….
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E
edjh
Nov 9, 2005
Crowder,Jakob Larry wrote:
I have a piece I’m working on and the whole thing I made as vectors. There’s one part I didn’t make a vector because the pen tool does some funny things (making a tree). So I took a tree, cropped it, pasted it and did a color overlay of black so it’s all one color and essentially looks like a vector tree. However, there are some rough edges all around it that kill the illusion of vector – what’s the best way to smooth these edges to give the impression it’s a vector. I tried a small radius of gaussian blur but you can tell it’s blurred a little. Any advice on smoothing it better?

P.S. I’m not looking for lectures on how photoshop can’t make ‘true vectors’ with the pen tool. I know photoshop rasterizes images not vectorizes. All this I know….

If you have Freehand or Illustrator you can bring that tree in and do an autotrace. There are autotrace programs out there.

In Photoshop you can make a selection out of the tree and go to the flyout arrow in the Paths palette and choose Make Work Path. This will give you a path. Won’t be real accurate and it will have far too many points, but it works. Then paste that mask into a Shape layer’s mask in Paths.

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postman delivers
Nov 10, 2005
"Crowder,Jakob Larry" wrote in message
I have a piece I’m working on and the whole thing I made as vectors. There’s one part I didn’t make a vector because the pen tool does some funny things (making a tree). So I took a tree, cropped it, pasted it and did a color overlay of black so it’s all one color and essentially looks like a vector tree. However, there are some rough edges all around it that kill the illusion of vector – what’s the best way to smooth these edges to give the impression it’s a vector. I tried a small radius of gaussian blur but you can tell it’s blurred a little. Any advice on smoothing it better?
P.S. I’m not looking for lectures on how photoshop can’t make ‘true vectors’ with the pen tool. I know photoshop rasterizes images not vectorizes. All this I know….

Jakob Larry,

Have you looked at Al-Dbbagh’s procedure to convert raster images into monochrome vector artworks by exporting it as a path to Illustrator? Then bringing the file back into photoshop?

http://www.myjanee.com/tuts/linedraw/linedraw.htm

JR the postman

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