Post by Thom WhiteI used a traditional work-around for this problem... I told the printer
there was no chance I was supplying such complicated artwork as vectors
- and he said a greyscale tiff was fine.
Yes, I had a look at illi's " miracle trace tool" and have been
wondering this myself. The resulting vector objects look like tiny
patches, any editing apart from replacing colours will likely be a
nightmare.
Post by Thom WhiteI have taken note of everyone's suggestions in case I need to actually
do some work in future though.
I have found that pre-processing the image in Photoshop is an essentila
step:
I usually experiment with the gaussian blur and/or median filters to
reduce noise and smoothen shapes. Then I take a look at what the image
looks like when selecting posterize with a low number of colours. When
I'm satisfied I save as tiff and trace either in Streamline or FreeHand.
Streamline in my opinion still offers the best fine-tuning options.
It's also worth noting that Photoshop itself has powerful, built-in
tracing. In a posterized image select any of the colours (e.g. Select ->
Color Range...) and convert the selection to paths. The resulting paths
can be imported as illustrator format into any of the major vector
drawing apps.
--
Cheers Martin