Quick and Painless Image Vectoring
Did you know that you could scale a vector graphic to the moon and back, and it wouldn’t lose any of it’s clarity or ultra smooth edges? Well, they don’t make printers that big… but at least you can create vector graphics from photographs in just a few simple steps! Here’s how!
I absolutely love finding graffiti. I try to capture and re-use simple tags or stencils in any way I can. Isolating and vectoring a tag like this, though, can often times be tedious and painful.
Or is it?
Here’s a quick how-to on vectoring photographs in just a few steps. With this technique, you could cut your work time in half, and the final results typically look great!
Step 1 – Getting Started
It’s usually easier to demonstrate these sorts of things with a real world example, so in this tutorial, we’re going to convert part of a photo I took with my phone. If you didn’t already know, phones typically don’t take crystal clear photos, but by the time we’re done converting things into vector format, we’ll have a graphic with great clarity.
In this tutorial, we’re going to isolate and vectorize the “Pirate Radio” text from the photograph.
First, we have to select the color of the object we want to isolate. For this, we’ll use the eyedropper tool and select the black lettering.
Step 2 -Sampling Colors
Once you’ve sampled the color, use Select Color Range to select the colors that compose the object you’re looking to vectorize.
The selection may look a little rough, but try to clean it up as best you can to select the areas as clearly as possible. If needed, you can add additional colors to your Color Range using the eyedropper tool with a plus symbol next to it (or remove sampled colors with the eyedropper tool with a negative symbol by it). The fuzziness value will allow you to select similar colors to the colors you’ve already sampled.
Step 3 – Clean Up!
You may notice that the “Select Color Range” picked up some extraneous parts of your image with similar colors. Using the selection tools, go back and get rid of these areas (Hold Ctrl + Minus for negative selections).
Disable your photograph’s layer, and create a new one on top of a white background. Using the Fill Tool, fill your selection to make sure you didn’t miss any huge extraneous parts.
Step 4 – Convert to Work Path
Okay, so our desired graphic is isolated, and we have a good selection to work with. Time to convert to Vector.
Go to your Paths Palette (Window > Paths if not already open), and click Make Work Path… This will convert your selection into a vector based work path.
Path Tolerance determines the work path’s fidelity. The lower the number, the closer the path stays to the pixels. It would be best to try this multiple times at different levels until you find a good looking path.
Here we have our beautiful path!
Select the Pen Tool from the toolbox, and while you have the path selected, right click anywhere inside of the working image area and select Define Custom Shape. After naming your custom shape, it will become visible in your custom shapes option bar.
To use your shape, select the Custom Shapes Tool, and select your shape from the options bar. Then drag it anywhere in your working image area to make a vector shape (Note: Holding shift will constrain the shape to it’s original proportions).
Here’s finished product, with a couple tweaks:
This is a great technique you can use in many scenarios Here are a few other situations I’ve used it in:
Enjoy, folks!
35 Comments
vist for basic training of photoshop
Flag as inappropriatehttp://training4free.co.cc/Basic%20training/Basic%20training.html
thank you so much sir
Flag as inappropriategreat tutorial . Thanks525
Flag as inappropriategreat tutorial . Thanks518
Flag as inappropriategreat tutorial . Thanks513
Flag as inappropriateMan… Love it .. Love it .. Love it … thanx soo much
Flag as inappropriateGreat tutorial!
Flag as inappropriateThis is very helpful. But it didn’t work for me correctly, why is my custom shape not filled with black? It just has a thin outline. Does anyone know why and how I can fix this?
Flag as inappropriategreat artistry, but what do vector mean? i really can’t understand it…
Flag as inappropriateThis is a very useful technique! It could save me a lot of time on logos. Thank you so much!
Flag as inappropriateGreat tutorial…thanks for the share
Flag as inappropriateVery useful tutorial.
Normally i use Illustrator but this is working fine (and quick!) for me too.
@Mark …
U can find Select Color Range in the Select menu. I have CS3 myself and it worked well!
Flag as inappropriateHi there, great tutorial. But I am using Illustrator CS3 and there does not seem to be the option to Select Color Range under select menu. Are we using a different version?
Flag as inappropriateGreat tutorial! I never thought about going about vectoring that way. Very nice.
You also picked some great pics. I particularly like the last example you gave. Very interesting.
Flag as inappropriate@M.Yousuf: Could I suggest taking a look at our “School of Photoshop” series? That ought to get you started with all the basics you’ll need to know!
Flag as inappropriateI like your tutorial,but I don’t catch easy,because I am beginner. I want first some basic
Flag as inappropriatetutorials.Can you help me.
Great tut!
Flag as inappropriateVery helpful,
it’ll save a
lot of a time
and do a world
of good! Thanks!
Great tutorial…thanks for the share!!
Flag as inappropriateLove it! Many thanks =)
Flag as inappropriateGreat tips! Thanks a lot.
Flag as inappropriatewell, HM, the path is a vector, but your results all depend on how you use it. You get pixelated edges in photoshop because photoshop outputs in pixels. in any image in photoshop, a zoom past 100% makes pixels highly visible.
If you were to open that same PSD in Illustrator, though, that custom shape becomes an object, in Illustrator, the shape looks the way it should, a completely legitimate vector, with no pixelations.
Flag as inappropriateThis is an excellent technique and saves hours of tedious fiddling. However, I’m not not so sure that the results can be described a vector. When I zoom in on my custom shapes, they definitely have a pixellated edge beyond 100% zoom, which you don’t get with pure Illustrator vectors, for example. Or am I just nit-picking? Thanks for your tutorials.
Flag as inappropriatethis is really cool! very simple but oh so effective! already used it on a couple of things hehe, really great tut!!
Flag as inappropriateFantastic tutorial. Thanks!!
Flag as inappropriatelot of thanks for yur tutorial. really useful.
Flag as inappropriategood tip. thanks
Flag as inappropriateThanks for the tutorial!
Flag as inappropriateReally useful tutorial, yet another immensely cool tip!
Jimmy
Flag as inappropriatewow fantastic tutorial! great job
Flag as inappropriateok, that’s suh-weet. I usually avoid illustrator like the plague because it’s the great unknown for me, but I may have to reevaluate my relationship with it, cause this trick is very cool and useful. :) Great tut!
Flag as inappropriatewow rly cool, i’ve tried this before but not with that lvl of success. i’ll give it another go
Flag as inappropriateWow, that’s exactly what I was looking for! I love it, I think it’s your most useful tutorial (for me).
You can’t do all scenarios, but many of them. Thank you!!!
LBrother
Flag as inappropriateOne of the images doesn’t have the telephone number blurred out. D’oh!
Flag as inappropriateVery useful way of making your own Stencil’s too. Great technique.
Flag as inappropriate