Vector Trace Services to Improve Image Clarity
Creative Repute offers professional vector tracing services.
Our award-winning graphic design team can help you vector trace your rasterized files so that you can scale images (larger and smaller) while still retaining their clarity. If you need an image traced into a vector format, please reach out to us.
Raster files vs. Vector files
There are two types of art files: raster files and vector files. You will likely work with some combination of the two as you produce various design materials for your brand. If you want to produce the highest quality images for web design, marketing campaigns, and print materials, it is very important that you work with a professional who has an understanding of these differences to determine which imprint method will work best for you.
Raster files are images that comprise thousands of little colored dots. All digital photographs are rasterized images because they are inherently made up of these dots, however artwork can be saved as a raster file as well. The more dots you have in a rasterized image, the cleaner and crisper the photo or art. On the other hand, if you want to increase the size of that artwork so that it’s larger than the original file size, or if there are not a lot of dots per inch, the quality will be poor. Simply “zoom” in to a rasterized image and this becomes clear (you’ll see the dots themselves rather than the picture and the image will be “pixelated”). This presents a disadvantage of raster files:
You cannot easily scale a rasterized image without ruining its quality.
Vector files are designs that are made up of points with definite positions on an X and Y-axis. Those points can be connected by lines that might be thick or thin, and the areas created by those lines can be filled with color. The art results from mathematical formulas rather than colored dots and is therefore scalable.
The most popular types of vector files are:
.ai: This file is popularly used in print media and digital graphics, such as social media marketing assets, and is created in Adobe Illustrator (hence the letters “ai”).
.pdf: This file is commonly used to share documents across platforms, and is short for “Portable Document Format.”
.svg: This file is beneficial for web use as it is based in a popular markup language called XML that can be indexed, searched, and scripted. It stands for “Scalable Vector Graphics.”
.eps: This file, short for “Encapsulated PostScript,” was a pioneer of vector files and is becoming less popular with time given its inability to support transparency as well as more modern vector files.
Some examples of vector art include logos, icons, charts, typography, and handlettering. The same piece of vector artwork can be used to print a tiny image on a lanyard or a huge billboard by a highway. This is an advantage of vector files:
Vector artwork can be infinitely adjusted in size without losing resolution.
For this reason, they are becoming the industry standard for high-quality designs, and many people are now faced with the challenge of converting photos into digital vector file formats. Programs such as Adobe Illustrator are most commonly used to create vector art files. It is important to note that only art created in a vector format is vector art. You can take a raster art file and open it in a vector program, then save it as a .eps or other common vector format extension, but that does not change a raster image to a vector image. It must be created as a vector file — with points, lines, and color fill — to be vector art.
Creative Repute is available to help you vector trace your rasterized files. Contact us to get started.
In addition to vector tracing images we also provide custom vector artworks from scratch. Please reach out to us to start the conversation about your design needs.
