Raster to Vector vendors?

[Stinkhorn Press]

I have Corel and Ai. I'm familiar with doing it there - I understand there are places where you can upload a raster and get back a vector image online. I assume there's a human on the other end? Anyone use these?

I'm doing shirts for a  yearly event that is a car show and every year before now he's just wanted 2 clip art cars, spot color. This year he wants us to take his photos of last years winners to put on the front (100 shirts). For 100 shirts it's not worth paying Dan or Scott to get great seps. We can do real crappy seps if we wanted to go the bitmap route for free. We could do a live trace and work from there -

 - are the online raster --> vector shops any better than that? (worth the cost). And if so - any recommendations (or anti-recommendations)?

[Homer]

need straight vector stuff, try:

http://www.vectordoctor.com/

PERSONALLY. if it was my shop, I wouldn't put out anything "crappy" and do GOOD seps myself or have Scott do them if I wanted really, REALLY good seps....

[Stinkhorn Press]

crappy is in the eye of the beholder.
i've printed Dan seps. I have Scott quoting me for some other seps. so i know how good our prints could be if done right.

and i've printed our seps. they don't meet my quality control, but they meet the customer's expectations - so on orders of 100 and less i make the call to roll with what we can manage to output. i don't charge art fees unless I know I AM sending out for good seps that are beyond my reach.

[tancehughes]

We use Qdigitizing for alot of this, or Vector Magic

[Homer]

crappy is in the eye of the beholder.

haha, I know what you mean...I've seen some "great work" by some locals that leave me scratching my head...

but yeah -vector doctor is the jam...for vectors. Scott is the guy for rasters....

[Croft]

I have used this one for a few years , for the $13 you can't beat it . has always done a great job.

http://www.24hourartwork.com

[Sbrem]

I haven't used any outside sources for that since we can do our own work here. However, some of the stuff our contract customers send in because they don't want to pay our price, is not what they would be getting from us, it's usually inferior. But maybe it's time to take a look again...

Steve

[jvanick]

we use copyartwork.com... they've always treated us good.  sometimes they don't get it on the first try and we need to have them 'fix' things, but everything they've done, even some gradient work, has come out looking really good.

[Stinkhorn Press]

Vector doctor could do a line drawing (or line drawing with simple fills) but said it'd run 50$ to $150 per.
I think I'll take a chance on 24Hr artwork - $13 per hour, figure 2 hours a apiece for what I'm needing and we're good to go.

I'll report back to see if the results are good enough to satisfy my needs at that price.

[Stinkhorn Press]

some good resources here. Most vectoring I just handle, but for some art, if the quality on the other end is there, these definitely provide a value.

[mooseman]

these guys are pretty good and fast

http://www.artworksource.com/Home
mooseman

[prozyan]

I use Frank Kenny.  orders@screenprintingart.com

[royster13]

Brian at www.artboygrafix.com , however, I do not send out much these days....

[screenxpress]

It's probably just me, but I'm kinda curious how you can take a multicolor photo and convert to a reasonable (number of colors) to print vector.

Perhaps because I'd probably be doing a Photoshop halftone sim process.

But maybe someone will edumakate me.   

[Sbrem]

Well, in Photoshop you could color posterize it, or use a cartoon filter like Toon Up or something similar, then take it into a GOOD tracing program (I like Illy CS6 way over it's earlier versions) but even then, I would, like you do a sim process. I suspect this is more of graphic logo issue here, but it's fun to theorize...

Steve