Newbie Question about Vector to Raster Graphics

[ellentk]

I've got a logo that was designed in Illustrator and then turned into a gif by a designer. The lines are smooth and it looks good online.

I'd like to reduce it to a few different sizes, but when I do in Photoshop, the lines get blurry or jagged. And when I open the original .ai file in Photoshop, just opening it makes it much more jagged than the gif.

The designer said that she spent a lot of time touching it up and I'm wondering if that's often the case and I'll need professional help to get the smaller versions looking smooth or if there is another program that will produce a gif that doesn't need hand touch ups?

Ellen

 

[leroy30]

Hi ellentk!

Firstly I'll explain a little bit about the difference between vector and raster and then I'll see if I can help! =)

Vector graphics use mathematical equations to describe straight lines and curves. Combined, many of these make a vector path which can be filled with a solid colour or a gradient. Because a mathematical path is a way of describing a line between two or more points then it can be resized to any scale without loss of quality.

A raster on the other hand is totally different. A raster (photographs are good examples) is described one point at a time. A 10 pixel (dots) by 10 pixel raster would be very small on your screen (probably 1024 x 768 pixels or similar) but if you resized it how would the application know what pixels should be in between? It has to fudge it and so you get jagged pixellation effects. **Vectors are great for logos and simple illustration but raster images are better for photographs and digital paintings etc.**

Sometimes the same effect can happen if you shrink a raster as well - depending on the file type, quality, sharpness etc.

Ok, now to solve your problem. When you open the original .ai file in photoshop (assuming it's contents are vector, which it should be) are you promted to load as smart object, raster object etc? If you load as smart object you will be able to resize as a vector - the final save to a .gif will convert the vector to a raster.

Failing the above if it's just resizing the image you could send it to me and I'll do if for ya (for free) if you like =)

After all we graphics people work insane hours for free right! ;o)

Good luck anyhow,
Le-roy.

Oh yeah I just realised you may also be having a problem in the sense that a .gif has a limited number of colours available and if you have a transparent background a .gif can only store transparent or not-transparent information (i.e. a pixel cannot be see-through it can only be visible or not visible) - which can account for a jagged edge effect.

 

[ellentk]

Hi Leroy,

Thanks so much for your reply.

A few things I didn't mention. The logo is for a local neighborhood association. I gave the ai file to a graphics guy one of our members knows. I don't know his skill level or what he tried, but he was not able to reduce it well either and also tried touching it up.

I think that my tests of opening the .ai file in my version of photoshop are probably useless, as I've got a very old version of photoshop which only gives me the choice of "rasterize generic pdf format." The ai file was created in Illustrator CS3 and I'm pretty sure it's vector or my photoshop would not present the "rasterize...." window when I open it and the designer told me it was vector.

Yes, the gif has a transparent background. I just tried removing transparency from the background and reducing the size but it looks just as bad w/o the transparent background.

I'd very much appreciate your taking a look at the files and telling me what's going on. And thank you for your offer to reduce our logo. But, if you do any work on them, we'd like to pay you. How do I send you the files?

Ellen