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sillouette or streamline??
- Thread starter georgyboy
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PixelMasher
Technical User
Streamline is good, but what I like to do in Photshop convert my bitmap into a grayscale, and create a path around the area I want to become vector. Then I export my path to Illustrator which will create a .ai file, open the file in Illustrator and then I will select the paths and start filling in with colors.
Prepress Solutions
PrepressSolution@aol.com
Prepress Solutions
PrepressSolution@aol.com
...or you could just open the file directly in Illustrator and use it's superior vector tools. If you open (rather than place) a raster image, you will have a full resolution file to work with, just like Photoshop, but it cuts out a few steps.
Manually drawing paths, whatever way you want to do it, is by far the most accurate. I like Streamline over Sillouette (although not by much), but I don't really use either of them regularly. By the time you've fine-tuned all the settings and manually corrected all the paths, you may as well have done it all from scratch.
One exception, though, is more expressive illustrations where accuracy isn't so important. Try using Streamline on a photograph for example, it's pretty effective!
Manually drawing paths, whatever way you want to do it, is by far the most accurate. I like Streamline over Sillouette (although not by much), but I don't really use either of them regularly. By the time you've fine-tuned all the settings and manually corrected all the paths, you may as well have done it all from scratch.
One exception, though, is more expressive illustrations where accuracy isn't so important. Try using Streamline on a photograph for example, it's pretty effective!
askIllustrator
Technical User
Before Streamline 4.0 I probably would have said it doesnt matter. My perfered meathod before that was placing in illus. fading and locking that layer, create new layer in wireframe mode and trace. Adobe really did something inbetween Streamline 3 and 4 though. I actually had some old files I had traced in 3 with un-useable results. I tried these in 4 with default conversion settings and was floored. I've sinced learned some pretty neat tricks in photoshop for cleaning up low res art and even faxes. A quick streamline and a few tweaks with illustrators path cleaning tools and I'm off and running. I did however watch the quicktime demo of sillouette the other day and if it's as good as it looks we may have a new winner. Unfortunatly, the demo image they used looked geared just to show off their tool and by itself would have taken less click with the path tool in illustrator to rebuild. So I'm not convinced it wouldn't just create more work for you. BEHOLD! As Steve Jobs introduces us the latest in desk-lamp technology!
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