Vector Magic

Anyone who has dealt with editing images files that contain text or drawings knows that once you save a file as a raster image (.jpg, .bmp, .gif), the text / drawing will look really bad if you try to zoom in on it.

I came across a new site/service called Vector Magic (by a group at Stanford University) that will automatically convert a rasterized image into a vector image. The vector image actually defines the text/drawing as a series of shapes which can be blown up with no loss of quality (it just draws bigger shapes).

For an example, I took the tiny logo from my site at margelefsky.com:




At the normal size, this picture looks just fine. However, since it is a .jpg file, when you zoom in on the file, you can see that it looks extremely pixelated and blurry.





Now, compare that zoomed view to the version of the file that I produced using Stanford's Vector Magic site:


(note: you can click on the image above to see a bit more of the file)

Obviously, the vector graphic produced by Vector Magic is MUCH clearer. Notice, however, that when the text was "traced", some of the letters did get a bit distorted (like the curved sides of the letter Y). However, considering that the old way of ray tracing an image was to do it manually in Photoshop or Illustrator, this is a HUGE improvement.