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- Vector Magic: The coolest thing since sliced bread?
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There are many tools reserved for the lucky few who have the luxury to afford and use Adobe’s Creative Suite. One of them is the livetrace tool in Illustrator. Using livetrace a photograph does not always work out quite that well, it also eats up all of your system resources to perform traces on highly detailed images. To that point, when I first saw Vector Magic, a project from Stanford University, I didn’t think much of it at first. But after using it I can’t help but highly recommend it!
Here’s why
- It’s completely free.
- The software is web based so there is no installation and more importantly the processing is done remotely from my machine.
- It’s incredibly easy, the process is straightforward and the UI guides you through every step clearly.
- Most importantly it works GREAT! I think it can trace photos better than illustrator’s livetrace.
You can even share your images if you’d like. I tried it on one of my photos. You can see the results of a photo I took last week at Harvard Square.