Turning a jpg into workable camera ready art

[chrisazor]

Anyone have any ideas what the best way would be to take a jpg file (someone's logo) and turn it into something that I can use for print. jpg is jaggy. I haven't been able to get the logo in eps format and I was trying to save time by not having to wait for it to come in the mail.
Help?ä

[chrisazor]

Anyone have any ideas what the best way would be to take a jpg file (someone's logo) and turn it into something that I can use for print. jpg is jaggy. I haven't been able to get the logo in eps format and I was trying to save time by not having to wait for it to come in the mail.
Help?ä

[Peter Clifton]

Chris

If the logo is that jaggy then there probably is not enough information in the bitmap to get a good vector trace out of an automated program like Adobe StreamLine or CorelTRACE

Your best bet (and I've done this many times in the past) is to import the JPEG into a vector package like Illustrator or CorelDRAW and use it as a rough template to recreate the logo from scratch.

Peter

[Beth]

something I have found to work with black and white logos, is to change to greyscale, increase the res to something apropriate and then do a series of gausian blur and then unsharp mask (or sharpen). This softens and smoothes the aliasing (chunkiness). The final step is to convert to black and white mode with 50% threshold. (Although some people prefer to leave line art in greyscale)

For full colour images, sometimes the best thing to do is the hand trace. It is time consuming but you will be able to use at any res you need.

Beth

PS: getting eps' is not always what you think anyway. I needed the dairy queen logo for something and the people there sent both a tiff and an eps file (cuz I asked for an eps)....well guess what was in the eps...the tiff file. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]

[Peter Clifton]

Beth

ROTFL

Been there [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

I have also foolishly asked for a scan of a B&W document to be emailed to me.

I got a 300 ppi, full page, 24 Bit, uncompressed TIFF........eventually.

Peter

[Beth]

This is a funny business that is for sure. I guess it is pretty hard for the average person to understand all the terminology. And there is a great deal of it. Bit depth, CMYK/RGB, density, compression, PDF....its never ending.

But sometimes you wonder if they come from the same planet. I had someone that wanted to fax me a paper sample, saying 'can you get something like this?' Argh!

Guess the secret is to roll with the punches.
Beth

[Peter Clifton]

Beth

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>But sometimes you wonder if they come from the same planet. I had someone that wanted to fax me a paper sample, saying 'can you get something like this?' Argh!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

That'll be using the TREK NCC-1701 Plain Paper Transporter with the optional Chief O'Brien attachment then [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Peter

Write something memorable and live forever - anonymous

[chrisazor]

I did end up taking the jpg file into freehand and just manually traced the outlines. What I needed was something I could work with for color separations. I've been there many a times myself and certainly know that high res fax that all people seem to think we can use for camera ready...
Client is happy with it, and I am too. Certainly didn't hurt to ask though.∞