Anyone using Vector Magic?

[Prosperi-Tees]

I have been using 24 hour artwork.com and artworksource .com for all my vector redraws strictly because they are so freakin cheap and have never given me any problems. A customer of mine just sent me a file he got using Vector Magic. Is it worth it? Or does it still give somewhat unusable results?

[whitewater]

i've been using it for a few years...when it was actually free...it really depends on the resolution of the original file.

[Nation03]

I've had it for a while. It has definitely helped me out more then a few times. It won't work "magic" on images that are super blurry. But if its a crappy jpeg file that needs some cleaning up, it does the trick. Usually people with crap artwork aren't to fussy, and vector magic usually gives passable results.

[Northland]

I've had a subscription for a couple years. I get good results tracing art.... but poor results when tracing text.

[tancehughes]

It's alright, it definitely has gotten me out of some jams. Worth the 7.95/month. It however, doesn't perform "magic" as it may lead you to believe. If the program doesn't convert like I want, I just tell them to handtrace it. They are very good at that.

[screenxpress]

Vector Magic can do a decent job, but include Inkscape in your bag of tricks too. 

http://inkscape.org/

Little quirky to use, but works in a pinch, does a decent job, and it's free.

[Prosperi-Tees]

It's alright, it definitely has gotten me out of some jams. Worth the 7.95/month. It however, doesn't perform "magic" as it may lead you to believe. If the program doesn't convert like I want, I just tell them to handtrace it. They are very good at that.

is hand tracing an extra fee?

[inkbrigade]

We bought the desktop version after having a subscription for many years.
It works pretty good, but not all the time.
Sometimes we still send stuff to 24 hour artwork

[Sbrem]

I've never liked the results much; we mostly redraw here, but more and more contract customers are going to outside cheap sources. If that's OK with them, it's OK with us too.

Steve

[blue moon]

as many said, it should be in your bag of tricks! We had a subscription and used it when Illustrator would not do it justice. CS6 vector conversion engine is very good and we now do almost everything here. When we can't do it in house it goes to one of the companies found through Vector Magic (Lizardfish graphics) or Jason here on the board.

pierre

[GraphicDisorder]

We use it almost daily.  Its great to clean up a lot of stuff.  It's not a fix all but it really does get you out of a lot of problems in a quick second.

We redraw from scratch when needed. 

[Get Shirts]

Livetrace in AI can yield the same, if not better, results... And it's already on your desktop!

[Frog]

I remember a few years back when many of us were the Vector Magic development guinea pigs and free users, someone, maybe Diane CYW, did some comparison tests of VM, and CorelDRAW and AI traces and in the end, some were better with one while another with another and so forth. None of the canned trace programs were the one end-all be-all.
That's one of the reasons, I bet, that these places like artworksource and others merely re-draw rather than trying to fix our crap.

[GraphicDisorder]

AI is good, but ive found almost any case with Text in the design, Vector Magic just does it better.  So we go with it most of the time.

[Sbrem]

It's always the text... the smaller, the worse. Anybody ever try ImagaroZ?

Steve