help please

[theinonen]

Normally I would agree about autotracers, but with these types of images those would actually work quite well. Stencils are pretty much just outline images and there are some excellent outline tracers for turning bitmap images to vector.

Trick is not to have too many colours and some programs have posterise and clean up options to help with preparing the image. When reducing colour depth with bitmap software, it should be done without any dithering as the cleaner the image without extra noise, less shapes the resulting vector image will contain.

Below is an autotrace example made from Cocal Cola logo in PNG file format. (Taken from Wikipedia.) Colour depth was reduced to 1bit and then autotraced with Image Outliner with almost default settings and as can be seen, it will look pretty much identical and just pressing button is in this case obviously much faster than tracing it manually.


(Little tip: If you have black and white outline images, then watermark is not very good way to protect those as it will disappear when reducing colour depth and the resulting image will trace just fine.)