Convert images from raster to vector. Converting a raster image to a vector image using Adobe Illustrator

While my article about masks in Photoshop is still active, I urgently want to cover the issue of converting a raster into a vector. Two days ago, I logged into my chronophagy Google Analytics and what did I see? It turns out that some people come to my site by requesting “raster to vector”, but meanwhile, on my site there is not a single sensible note on this topic. People are torturing Google to convert raster to vector in Corel Draw, Illustrator and even Adobe Photoshop. Let's start with Photoshop.

From raster to vector. Why is this needed?

Photoshop is a raster program. The vector is present in it in the form of vector contours. There are no vector objects as such in Photoshop. But there are vector paths that can be converted into a vector mask. The mask is applied to an effect or object and a vector is obtained in Photoshop. The contents of such an object are still raster, but can be converted to a vector when saved in some formats.

For example, we can create a fill and drag a vector mask over it. There is a whole group of tools in Photoshop that do this for free and automatically, this is a group of vector primitives. Read my article or for more details. So the contour will be vector. Filling inside the raster.

Photoshop does not work with vector at full power. Only uses its advantages here and there. But even in Photoshop, raster objects can be turned into vector ones. Why is this necessary if you have Illustrator? Well, how can I tell you? When actively working with graphics, different situations arise. Sometimes it’s easier to convert a selection into a path on the spot than to go headlong into Illustrator and do tracing there. To weed a strawberry bed at your dacha, you don’t need to call a combine harvester. In the end, not everyone wants or knows how to use Illustrator, not everyone needs it, not everyone can install it, but you need to convert the squiggle into a vector here and now. It is not at all necessary to sit down with three volumes on Illustrator for a couple of weeks.

Converting raster to vector in Photoshop

What exactly can Photoshop convert into a vector? Anything as long as you select this object with the group tools in advance Select. Photoshop converts any selection into an outline. You can read about selection tools in the article. Let me give you a working example. Many years ago, I was approached by a very difficult customer who requested a complex website. It was necessary to do various art for the site, and I decided to draw it in Photoshop. During the drawing, I converted it into a vector, and now I will tell you how. Here is one such image that I painted with a hard edge brush on a tablet. I traced the original Vitruvian Man, modified it and drew my own face, different from the original. The idea to vectorize art came by accident. But having implemented it, I got the opportunity to scale a person in any way I wanted. Moreover, previously jagged edges and irregularities were smoothed out after vectorization.

Finding an image to trace

I looked up a butterfly on Google Images. We will convert it into a vector. Please note that the larger the image, the smoother our vector object will turn out. This is true for both Photoshop and Illustrator. By large image I mean a picture that is 1000 pixels wide or more. My butterfly, for example, is from 2000 pixels.

Selecting an object

Select from menu Tool the most ordinary magic wand Magic Wand Tool and click on the white area. So we have created a selection area, but we need to select the butterfly.

Go to Select > Inverse or click on the work area and select from the menu that appears Select Inverse. The point is that the created selection must be inverted to select the butterfly. To be honest, I don’t really care how you create your selection. Even though you manually trace the lasso, it doesn't make any difference.

Create a vector outline

We have a selected area, now let's convert it into a vector path path. Select any selection tool like Lasso Tool, Rectangular Marquee Tool or Magic Wand Tool. Right-click on the selection area and select from the menu that appears Make Work Path. In the menu that appears, set the degree of smoothing Tolerance taste. The dependence is simple. The higher the number, the higher the smoothing. The lower the number, the lower the smoothing. High anti-aliasing means a lower number of vector nodes and more inaccurate raster contour following. In the case of my Vitruvian Man, this is exactly the effect I wanted.

So, in the palette Path We now have a working circuit. If you don't have a palette Path open it Windows > Path Palette working area Path looks like a desktop or temporary home. Different outlines may appear on it, but if you take care of consistent conservation, they will disappear over time. Double click on the outline Work Path and save the outline separately. Contours in the area Path work the same as layers in a palette Layers. If the outline is selected, it means it is active and you can work with it.

Tools for working with paths in Photoshop - Path Selection Tool And Direct Selection Tool. We have an outline, but no object. If you've read my series of posts about vectors in Photoshop, you already know that a vector in Photoshop is represented as a vector mask for some kind of effect or graphics. The vector may also be present in the form of a smart layer that links to the imported Illustrator file, but we’ll leave that for another note. Select the outline with the tool Path Selection Tool or in the outline palette Path. Click Layer > New Fill Layer > Solid Color We have created a fill layer, which is immediately assigned a vector mask in the form of our outline.

Finalization of the vector outline

Using the materials that I described in the articles, we will complicate the drawing. I took the tool Pen Tool, selected the fill layer mask. In settings Pen Tool exhibited Subtract and added some elements to our butterfly. I cut out patterns on the wings, and made the legs and antennae thicker.

Creating a custom shape Custom Shapes

You can always save the resulting object into arbitrary shapes Custom Shapes. Some time ago I mentioned how this can be done in an article. Select the butterfly layer and click Edit > Define Custom Shape Our butterfly appeared in the tool shapes Custom Shapes Tool.

And here's what we ended up with:

Converting a raster photo into a vector in Photoshop is a completely pointless exercise. But sometimes such techniques can be useful for side work with graphics and more.

Converting from raster to vector photography in Photoshop

Photoshop is not designed to convert raster graphics into vector. It, however, contains several special effects that visually create the resemblance of a vector image. And using the technique I described, you can make a vector image from them in Photoshop. Let's take for example an ordinary photograph taken by a photographer I know.

One of the effects I mentioned is Filter > Artistic > Cutout I leave the settings up to you. The image should be as realistic as possible, but highly smoothed. We could stop here, the image already looks “vector”, but it is still raster.

Now you need to create vector areas equal to the number of colors in the photo. Choose a stick Magic Wand Tool and make sure that the checkbox is not checked in the settings Contiguous. Select the first area and follow the entire path I described above. Create a path from the selection, a filled vector mask from the path, and so on.

In total, the entire photo is converted into vector areas. We will not convert the last white area into a vector. Just draw a big white square with the tool Rectangle Tool and place it under all layers. After some light cleaning and contouring, the photo looks like the image below. And once again, such work is not intended for Photoshop and is rather a perversion. But, it can be done, and in various situations such techniques can be useful. Processing the photo took me 10 minutes, so this kind of work doesn’t take up a lot of time. And remember, the larger the photo you arrange into layers in this way, the better and more elastic the outline will be able to go around the selection areas. The less angular and rough our vector will turn out in Photoshop. Various settings Tolerance when creating a contour they will also give different results. Happy experimenting!

On the Internet, I found an image of the logo. Is it possible to convert it from raster to vector in Photoshop, and automatically? No you can not. Alas, while vector trends in Photoshop are as follows, everything that was done in this direction remained unchanged 5 versions ago. Since then, it has not been touched, not changed, and nothing new has been added to the vector. Have you needed vector tools in Photoshop? Here they are, want more? Whatever else you forgot about Photoshop, master Illustrator. Approximately this line of thought motivated the developers who introduced the simplest vector operations into Photoshop. Now let's get down to business.

The raster is converted into a vector through selection areas. First, we create a selection, then we convert the selection lines into vector paths, then we fill the vector paths with fill layers, thus creating a vector mask. In order to understand all this not at the level of army commands - click here, click there, it is worth learning how to work with vector drawing tools, understand how vector contours can interact with each other, and learn how to create a vector mask. But don’t worry, you don’t have to sit down to read it until the weekend; you’ll already understand how to convert a raster into a vector in Photoshop if you read the article to the end.

Logo highlighting

I would especially like to note that in order for the translation into vector to be of high quality, the image itself must be large in size. This is true in the case of tracing in Illustrator, but for Photoshop it is even more important. My image is 1500 pixels wide, when we finish converting it to vector, I will show how Photoshop translates a small image and we will compare the results.

Choose the Magic Wand Tool

Set the Tolerance options to 20 or 30.

There, click on the Add to Selection icon. I wrote in detail about their work in the article Add, Subtract, Intersect and Exlude in Photoshop where we talked about vector tools, but in selection these options work the same way.

To be honest, I don’t care how you select the logo, whether using a manual lasso or using the Color Range. It’s just that in this situation, specifically in this image, the easiest way to do this is with the Magic Wand Tool.

Converting the selection to a vector path

Don't switch from the Magic Wand Tool.

Right-click on the selection area.

From the menu that appears, select Make Work Path.

In the window that appears, set the tolerance to 1.0. The higher the tolerance value, the smoother, stylized and imprecise our contours will be.

In the illustration below, I selected the Path Selection Tool and selected the path so that you can see it.

Saving a path in the Path palette

This operation is not required, but recommended.

Switch to the Path palette. If you can't find it, click Window > Path

Double-click on the path in the palette.

In the window that appears, enter a name and click OK.

Creating a vector mask

The process of creating a vector mask is perfectly described in my article Vector Mask in Photoshop. We will carry out this process quickly and without details.

Make sure your kennel is selected in the Path palette

Select Layer > New Fill Layer > Solid Color from the menu

In the window that appears, select a color and click OK

That's all. Everything would be more accurate if it weren’t for hronofag.ru Remember I told you that the smaller the image, the worse it will translate. I bet you have some kind of dirty scan on your hands, shoved into Word, which the customer requires to be converted into a vector? I guessed? In this case, the image is compressed with JPG compression, reduced, then enlarged, then again reduced to the size of the avatar, and ketchup was also spilled on it. Is it possible to efficiently convert such a picture into a vector in Photoshop?

First, take a look at our logo. Despite the excellent resolution and clear edges, Photoshop was unable to create good and even contours. The illustrator does it 100 times better, but the article is not about the illustrator. As you can see, the contours are not smooth everywhere, even in the rectangular parts of the logo. And the circles are completely oblique.

Now I will reduce the image by 2 times, then by another 2 times and show you the result of converting it into a vector.

Here is a clear example of how the size of a raster image affects the quality of tracing. And this despite the fact that the image is of very high quality despite the size. Well, I'll reduce the quality. Let's save the image in JPG at the worst quality.

Let's convert it to a vector. Excellent result, only ketchup is missing. Just right for a satisfied customer, grunge or vintage treatment!

And yet I manipulate the truth slightly. The fact is that all this is reasonable for Illustrator, who creates a vector based on a picture. Photoshop doesn't create a vector based on an image, it creates outlines based on a selection. Logically, the better and smoother the selection, the smoother the curves will be. And the Magic Wand tool, which we used to select these areas, will no longer be suitable for selecting such creepy images. Yes, you will be able to make high-quality selections, using all the selection tools, you will even be able to enlarge them and create a more or less even outline based on them, which will still not be perfect. Going this way is simply a waste of time. The only working option is to draw the logo from scratch in Photoshop.

In what format should the logo be? There are a huge number of formats in which you can save it.

Each of them has its own purpose, as well as advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, it is very important to know the features of the most popular graphic formats in order to know the possibilities of using each of them.
But before we start talking about graphic formats, we need to make it clear that in the world of graphics files there are two main types of formats: raster and vector graphics. This is a very important point. People who have been working with graphic editors for several days know perfectly well what the difference is, and beginners need to learn this in order to know how to do it correctly.

Vector graphics

Vector images are formed from different lines and geometric shapes, the size of which is determined by mathematical equations.

Advantages vector images:
— such images always retain excellent quality when scaled and edited;
— the image size has almost no effect on the file size, so it is always small.

Flaws vector images:
- the images are not realistic;
— not many effects are available.

Vector graphics images in most cases have the extension AI, CDR, CGM, DXF. CorelDraw is the most popular graphics editor.

Examples showing the effect of vector graphics when zoomed in:

Raster graphics

The essence of raster images is that they resemble a table with many small cells. Table cells are called pixels. Pixel is a particle of a raster image. All pixels are the same in size and shape. Each pixel has its own color and coordinates. Because the pixels are very small, this mosaic appears as one piece if the image quality is good. With high resolution, our eyes do not see the “pixelation” of the image.

Advantages raster images:
— realism, they are able to convey graphics consisting of thousands of small details;
- You can apply many different effects to images;
— using raster graphics you can create almost any drawing, of any complexity, which is why it is more widespread.

Flaws raster images:
- large file size;
— loss of quality when scaling.

Raster graphics images in most cases have the extension JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, PSD.
Let's look at what happens to a raster image when enlarged:
The most popular program for editing raster images is Photoshop.

Logo formats

Now that we have clarified for ourselves what vector and raster graphics are and why they are needed, let's move on to a review of graphic files in which you can save your logo.

Vector formats

.Ai – Adobe Illustrator

The vector file format .Ai from Adobe allows you to save the file in its original form - all logo elements, such as icons, text, are available for editing and can be edited at any time in the future. To open a logo in Ai format, you will need special programs such as Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW.

In most cases, you can change the text in this format. Opens using programs: Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW

Functions: needed to make changes to the original logo.

.EPS – Encapsulated PostScript

This file type is needed for higher quality logo printing: it allows you to scale the logo without losing quality. The advantage of a logo in EPS format is the ability to simultaneously use both raster and vector image elements. However, editing a logo in EPS format is much more difficult than, for example, in Ai format.

Open with: Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Inkscape.

Functions: for use on printed media, scaling for printing.

.PDF – Portable Document Format

The vector format.PDF is preferred by many designers for a number of reasons. PDF is a convenient format because it displays all fonts, page layouts, vector and raster images without modification.

Opens with Adobe Reader, Foxit Reader, Preview.
Editable with programs such as Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Inkscape.
Functions: image viewing and printing.

Raster formats

.PNG – Portable Network Graphics

PNG is a great format for logos. It is capable of “compressing” files without distortion. PNG was created to replace GIF files, which include only 256 colors.

Open with: Photoshop (convenient for editing), or any other image viewing program.

Functions: For web graphics and print (300 dpi)

.JPG / .JPEG – Joint Photographic Experts Group

JPEG is the most common image format on the web. The JPEG logo is compressed so files load faster. Also, the JPEG format can be saved at a higher quality, not very distinguishable from vector graphics images.

Open in Photoshop to edit, for viewing - in any other program.

Functions: Web graphics and printing (300 dpi).

.TIFF – Tagged Image File Format

TIFF are the big brothers of JPEG files. TIFF files are higher quality and take up more hard drive space.

Open in Photoshop – for editing, for viewing opens in any program.
What is it used for: generally for printing (300dpi).

“Minimum set” of logo formats

To use a logo for all occasions, you need to have a logo file in the following formats:
— .Ai – for the ability to edit the logo. Change color, background, scale.
— .EPS or .PDF – for printing.
— .PNG — for printing and working on the Internet (for a website, social pages). You definitely need a PNG version of the logo on a transparent background to place it in the website header, on a business card, like a watermark in a photo.

How does raster to vector conversion work?

Vector graphics are a set of curves, points, lines that are represented by mathematical expressions. Raster graphics are a collection of pixels with color and brightness values. The online converter finds areas with the same brightness and color parameters and represents them in the form of lines, curves and circles.

As a result of this, a raster image of SVG format can be infinitely enlarged without loss of quality.

Converting raster to vector

The online service begins its work immediately after loading the original image.

On the left of the screen you see the source file with a set of colors detected in it, on the right - the result:

Using the available tools you can:

Disable the presence of certain colors
Set the total number of colors in an SVG file
Set Tolerance and Blur

By changing the parameters and pressing the “Update” button, you immediately see the final result. In order not to struggle with the settings for a long time, you can also use a ready-made set of presets:

Photography (many/few colors)
Drawing (many/few colors)
Clipart (black and white, many/few colors)

By clicking on the + and – buttons on the right side of the window, you can increase or decrease the values of Color, Detail, Border Width. There you can merge all layers with flowers into a single layer.

After you are satisfied with the result, click the “Download” button and download the vector image in SVG format to your disk. Everything is free.

The service also has such a feature as a G-code generator. I can't imagine what it's needed for. If anyone knows, write in the comments.

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It may happen that you suddenly need to convert a regular raster image into a vector format. If you have never dealt with vector graphics before or have very vague ideas about it, then probably the first thing that will come to your mind is to find a converter program on the Internet, load a raster image into it and, as usual, get the finished result. But it's not that simple.

You shouldn’t rely on so-called raster-to-vector converters, since not all of them give the desired result. Most of these programs simply convert one format to another, for example, JPG to EPS, but this does not change the essence. And all because a raster and a vector are fundamentally different things and there is no way to convert them directly. If a raster image is a set of dots - pixels, then a vector image is essentially a mathematical formula, therefore the approach to it should be completely different.

By the way, the same EPS can store both vector and raster objects. And yet, there is a way to convert an ordinary picture into a vector, only it is not called conversion, but tracing or vectorization. There are two main types of tracing - manual and automatic. When manually tracing, a raster image opened in a vector editor is traced along the contours on a new layer, and then colored. With automatic vectorization, all these actions are performed by the program.

For example, the vector editor Adobe Illustrator provides a separate option for these purposes. To convert a picture into a vector, open it in the editor, select it with the mouse, and then select in the top menu “Window” -> “Image Trace”.

This will open a small toolbar where you can select the most suitable template. By default, Illustrator converts the image to black and white vector "silhouette".

To create the most realistic image, you should choose a preset "High precision photography". You can also set the maximum value for the parameter instead "Color Accuracy" using the slider, while the remaining parameters will be selected automatically. Before starting the vectorization process, make sure that the mode is still set "Color", and the palette "Full tone". Click the button "Trace" and wait for the conversion process to complete.