The Magical Vector Machine

Hello boys and girls. How are you today? Good.

Today we’re going to learn about something called Vector Magic. Can you say that? I knew that you could.

What is Vector Magic?
Well class, I’m glad you asked. It’s about a magical world of vectoring, where you take an image and transform it into something vectory so that you can more easily play with it. You like to play, don’t you? Yes, of course you do.

Let’s play!
Pipe down my little munchkins or teacher will have to open a can of whoop-A, all right?

Sorry
Darn straight.

Now where was I? Oh yes, we need a friend to demonstrate how Vector Magic works. Let’s invite our little green alien friend, Gummy. Oh don’t worry. He may be an alien, but he’s definitely legal. Okay? Okay.

First, we upload the cute little bugger into the machine. You can almost hear him squeal with delight. Then we select the number of colors that Gummy wears.

Now, even though the machine is very helpful and suggests the best number of colors to choose from, I’m going to choose more to increase my chances of a better image.

And this is what we get:

Not too shabby, class. But let’s try again with even more colors. Everybody — pretend you’re a rainbow!

Okay, so maybe you can’t tell the difference, but work with me, okay?

Now, we get to choose between two different formats?

What’s a format?
It’s what you wipe your feet on before entering the house. HAHAHA…get it? I was pretending to say “floor mat”…er, oh nevermind.

Anyway, EPS and SVG are our choices. I’ve chosen the SVG one. When I open it up in a vector-based program like Inkscape, I can now ungroup little Gummy and move the pieces around like this:

Isn’t that special?

So what have we learned today class?
We can save time by not having to recreate or trace over images using a free tool called Vector Magic.

[tags]vector magic,software,web 2.0,internet tools[/tags]