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Ok, Ive seen A LOT of this and I know people do it. I recently read an article in Computer Arts mag on the guy from Design Chapel (awesome site) and he said he brings all of his pictures into Freehand and "turns" them into the vector art thats throughout his site.
Does anyone know how to do this exactly? Freehand is the Macromedia App I use the least so I wouldnt know how to do this. Any direction, tips, advice would be great.
Thanks in advance.
Adobe Streamline does a great job of this!
Freehand has a tool called autotrace. Try that.
It takes a fair amount of tuning colors and line qualities and stuff so you just have to trial and error your way through it. Most of the time you still have to do a lot of hand editing but give it a try.
most of the really well designed vector pieces are all hand drawn on a raster picture, then they get rid of the raster. autotracers and flash's trace bitmap work pretty good, but to get those excellent ones you must draw them by hand yourself.
Bill Erickson
New Media Entrepreneur
Well I cant draw to save my life (but Im hoping to learn IF I get accepted to this one school) For now. I would like to try and vectorize some of my pics.
Hey, AlexW. Where is that autotracer command in FH10?
Hey, MG315. What exactly is a raster picture?
Agreed.
I tend to give autotrace a few goes at it to see how close it gets to the result I want. If it's not good enough, I lock the background image down and start a highlights layers. Usually I make the shapes partially transparent so I can see what I'm doing. When I'm finished I switch that layer off, make another layer under the first and concentrate on the highlight/midtones area, and so on.
It takes a while and you can have as many layers as you like, but it looks pretty cool when it works. Julio used that method on the 2 new SitePoint books covers .
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