Ask HN: The best way to convert paper drawings to digital images ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The best way to convert paper drawings to digital images ?

4 pointscode_devil5 comments

I am making an application for exchanging virtual goods. I have someone in the family that is very talented and can draw pretty much any form of art on paper. However, I want these drawings for my application. What is the best/easiest/cheapest way to convert these images to digital format ?

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Scan it, ship it off to your outsourced art talent, tell them what sort of deliverable you need, and let them worry about how they accomplish it. They're the professionals, after all.

(Outsourced artistic talent is very, very cheap. Find somebody you like on one of the sites, develop a working relationship, bring them work on a regular basis. Its a win for you and a win for them: you don't waste your super-valuable time doing low-value-added tasks, they don't have J. Clueless Client asking for 15 revisions and then dickering around with actually paying them for services rendered.)

If you want vector graphics, my meager experience fwiw:

Some months ago, I used potrace to convert drawings to SVG. Specifically, on a Windows box, if I recall correctly, I used it via the front end Rasterbater (needs .NET 2). I was quite satisfied with the result.

This was for some simple black on white images. The Wikipedia page for potrace (first link, below) has a bit of language about Inkscape being able to do a color decomposition.

    > Inkscape is capable of producing color images by
    > decomposing each channel into several black and white
    > images and tracing them separately with Potrace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrace

http://potrace.sourceforge.net/

Link to Rasterbater is under the anchor below (it's a link to a zip of the program; the program doesn't appear to have it's own descriptive page, although the hosting site has a one line description on the default page for the domain):

http://potrace.sourceforge.net/#other

Regarding Inkscape, this boingboing page (I happened on while googling Rasterbater) has the following comment:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/21/web-site-converts-ph.ht...

    > Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) uses Potrace
    > (http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ ) and optionally
    > Autotrace ( http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/ ) for
    > it's own raster to vector. It costs 100% less than
    > the price of Illustrator CS or Corel, a.k.a free.

Scan, and Vectorize with Vector Magic - http://vectormagic.com/home

recently, i:

1. used my camera to take photo of an illustrated page from a very old book (copyright expired). i borrowed the book via LINK+, and it was delivered to my local library for free.

2. used Vector Magic to vectorize (within 2 free "credits" limit) the image.

3. edited result of #2 with Inkscape, so it's much more "stylized" (much simplified; just a few filled-and-stroked paths).

A scanner? If you want it vector then use illustrator to vector-trace it...

There are far too many options...

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