Vector Magic – fix those blurry images

I found Vector Magic thanks to StumbleUpon. Its URL is at stanford.edu – so I guess it’s being developed by some clever students!

It’s a site that will make your crummy pictures & logos look better. You know the ones – you try to stretch them & they go all fuzzy at the edges. Here’s the ‘official’ explanation:

This site converts bitmap images to vector art – it’s an online auto-tracer.

Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you.

Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated.

I tried it with a screen shot I’d taken from our website. It was easy to follow the steps & come out with a smooth picture after less than a minute.

You can download the new image in various formats: EPS, SVG & PNG. I don’t know what any of these mean but the site gives you a brief explanation. I tried them all to see what results I could get. I couldn’t read the SVG. The EPS was best. I took it into another program & saved it as a jpeg file. It still went a little fuzzy around the edges when I stretched it REALLY large – but it was a million times better than the original.

You don’t have to sign up for anything – you can just run your picture through & then run away. However, if you want to do this often, you can sign up & keep track of all of your uploaded images, rather than just the most recent ones. This can be useful if you are tracing a lot of images. I presume this service is free – it was certainly free to do the single image.

Go to Vector Magic – I suggest you watch the videos first.