WHAT IS VECTOR ART?
Bet you have heard about vector design and how it’s important for creating logos or different illustrations. Many entreoreneurs and business people who don’t have much in common with graphic design asked themselves: “What is vector art?”. It is artwork that is made in a vector graphics application. To fully understand how it works we need to take a look at another type of artwork called bitmap. Bitmap images (aka raster photos) can be digital paintings or photos or just about anything that we could see on the Internet. These pictures consist of numerous tiny pixels which are little squares and are the smallest points defining a visual content and its resolution. If there are lots of pixels in a photo, it is considered high resolution one and can be printed on large format materials maintaining detailed look. Though this is always true, there's a limit to the quality. If you try to zoom in rasters, you're going to see square dots and that's where quality of the image gets ruined. If you zoom out, then you don't really see them vividly. This happens because bitmaps are made out of pixels. Meanwhile, vectors are composed of anchor points, also known as vertices or beziers. If we take a look at how that works, we will see little blue nodes join a segment of a line to another forming shapes with various curves.
Nodes can flexibly move around making drawn objects be fully and easily editable. And since vectors are not created out of pixels there's basically unlimited resolution. This enables us to stretch photos as big as we want with no loss of quality. Mostly vector art is simple shapes and strokes with colors. It's not anything that would compare to a digital painting that you could do in Photoshop or Corel Painter. However, you still can do advanced graphic designs. Vectorized pictures are good for creating professional looking logos, maps, drawings, sketches, cartoons as their versatile function allows to enlarge and reduce artworks easily and manipulate the outlines and forms.
Advantages and disadvantages of bitmap and vector images
The advantage of working with rasters is that you can paint pixels in a way that's more natural and it's more like a real painting. This method is used in acquiring hyper-realistic pictures. Besides, you can smudge things around blending colors and pieces, adding realistic shadows or blurs, apply various filters, etc. This is something that you can't easily do in a vector application. This means that you cannot get the same effects in vector apps the way we can get them in bitmiap art painting.
Where can you produce vector graphics?
Since we have already answered to following question “What is vector art?”. Let’s talk about where and how we can produce vectorized images. The leading app in the market is Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw with Affinity Designer steadily entering the industry, but it still has a long way to go. If you want a free program you can choose Inkscape which is another good app created for Linux users. As the rule goes whatever is free cannot compete with the priced product.
Imagine you need bitmap to vector conversion for your business and you don’t have appropriate skills. Then your next choice to best is online image to vector tracing services. First, they have well trained and experienced raster converters. Second, it is less time and resource consuming as you don’t have to run to the nearest graphic design agency which not always happens to have professional vectorizers. Third, you don’t need to know much about the work, all you need to do is submit your jpg, png, tiff or other pixelated pictures through a special online form and send along some of your basic instruction and description what for you need the tracing of your photos. These details will also determine the vectorization techniques. The rest is the responsibility of the service to take the lead and provide you with satisfactory results. We strongly recommend starting to work with iVectorize.com, because it commits to deliver the best outcome, has really good customer care and treats its clients equally without taking advantage of the lack of knowledge of the client in vector graphics. Besides, after converting your JPEG to vector, your files are stored in your account and doesn’t matter you initially opened a free account or not. All you have to do is to register using the email you used for submitting your content and you will be able to retrieve your files.
What also below our video to see the transition from raster to vector: