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Re: Tracing in Xtreme
Some time back, I hand traced a TIFF image of an elegant script font logotype because my client (who designs wine labels in Napa Valley) needed to have a scalable vector version of the logotype for a new label she was designing. It took me about 3 hours to hand trace it in Xara. The client was happy and I was happy with the result.
I traced the same TIFF file in VectorMagic in 3 minutes and the results were every bit as good.
Now, if I charge $X for a hand trace that takes 3 hours, or charge $X for a trace of equal quality that takes 3 minutes... Let's see. 3 hours? 3 minutes? 3 hours? 3 minutes...?
Gary
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Re: Tracing in Xtreme
It doesn't sound to me like Earwig needs vector art in this case.
Perhaps just a simple LineArt filter is the ticket.
You can very quickly apply the lineart filter from Xero to get this tracing effect.
- Andy
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Re: Tracing in Xtreme
Professors get talky, and I don't want to bore you, but I spent many years wondering how it is that people believe in pictures and are sceptical about language. I make pictures that resemble illustrations because I find myself delightedly "believing" them more than I do the photos from which they're made. And there's even more pleasure when people ask to keep them because *they* find the pictures persuasive as well. On any number of lists you can find folks generating awful pics with filters, happy as clams because they think they look like "oils" or "watercolours". And by golly, sometimes they do, and they give pleasure in proportion as they do, far more than the mediocre color snaps that underlie the "paintings". Why? At least to some degree, it's because people manipulating bitmaps have stumbled on painterly tricks with lines or colours which some anonymous painter or etcher invented or unmasked a century or two ago -- or even in our own time. (Ask yourself how long it's been since we could convincingly represent birds, for example). At any rate, the play of lines embracing a subject have long invoked the worker's powers of invention, and delighted the viewer. Do it right, and you win his allegiance in a flash. (Take a look at the Denver Gillian illustrations here, for example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/leifpeng/sets/1624959/) People -- ordinary people -- bring an incredibly sophisticated apparatus to bear on a picture put before them, and a line that persuades is a lovely thing to command. I envy those who can make one with a pen, but I can't. These machines tempt me to hope anyway.
Earwig