Image Trace verses Manual Conversions?

Image tracing

Auto tracing your artwork into a vector image can sometimes be beneficial depending on the quality of the original image. In my view image tracing or autotracing is only really successful when performed on high resolution images although it doesn’t really work for most logos. It would produce fairly decent results on a photograph but then what is the point as it will never be as good as the original photo image. Also, it may contain several thousand or million points and lines that might produce a large file size.

Auto tracing logos will very rarely produce decent results. Most typefaces contain some geometrical elements that are consistent throughout; therefore, the results from an auto-trace would just not be suitable. But it may be suitable if performed on a handwriting style typeface where the irregularities of an auto-trace may not be that noticeable. But if you imagine how a company logo may be used, for example, on the side of a van or large vinyl banner then any small flaws will be magnified.

A logo could be part manually drawn and part auto traced. For example, imagine a logo which contains text and a graphic element. If the graphic is a very complex or detailed random image such as a silhouette of a tree, then it might be OK to auto-trace and produce good enough results. But the text would have to be manually redrawn.

We rarely auto-trace images, although sometimes it works out to be more suitable and can reduce the costs to our clients.

Manual Vector Conversion

So generally as a rule, if your logo needs to be redrawn into vector then we would advise that it’s manually redrawn as it will always produce superior results.

If you look at the example above this will give you some idea how your logo may turn out compared to a manual vector conversion.