Raster to Vector

[Wubalubdub]

Is it possible to get illustrator to reproduce a clean vector copy of this consisting of straight lines and clean arcs?

Thanks!

[Mylenium]

Not automatically. You have to re-draw it manually.

Mylenium

[Dynamic Office]

Yes, you can.

It's called Image Trace - It's not perfect but will give you a pretty good building block to start.

Open your Raster image > Using Selection Tool (v) Select the image > Object > Image Trace > Make and expand

As i'd mentioned it's not perfect;

And arguably if you want nice clean, straight lines you'd be better off just creating it yourself as this image is noisy as heck but, it works surprisingly well for most images.

[Kris Hunt]

Do you suppose that Mylenium, being a MVP, has never heard of Image Trace before?

He was correct in asserting there is no way to get a clean vector copy of that consisting of straight lines and clean arcs.

[Dynamic Office]

I'm not a mind reader, or have ever met Mylenium - So no, i'm not aware if he knows or doesn't know.

Just trying to help as best I can, as i'd explained it's not perfect and JET has kindly offered more information on it.

What's not useful is your comment

[JETalmage · Accepted solution]

Is it possible to get illustrator to reproduce a clean vector copy of this consisting of straight lines and clean arcs?

No. It is possible for you to use Illustrator (or any other vector-based drawing program) to intelligently re-draw it as clean vector paths, so long as you know what the content is actually supposed to look like.

Your image (especially in the lower right portion) is a great case-in-point example of the widespread misconception about auto-tracing and, more fundamentally, about the resolution-independent advantage of vector-based graphics in general.

The scalability advantage of vector-based artwork is not automatically gained merely by consisting of  vector paths instead of raster pixels. Garbage-in; garbage-out still applies. Entropy rules. As you can see in post 2, if the raster is poor quality and has insufficient resolution for intelligible information, auto-tracing just trades one kind of ugly noise (raster pixilation) for another (vector jaggedness).

Auto-tracing is not magic. It doesn't create information where there is none. It just tries to trace a vector path around—or through in centerline mode—areas of contiguous same- or similar-colored pixels. In a graphic like this, centerline mode would be the more appropriate setting. But even that would be a waste of time because of the largely unintelligible jumble of pixels at the lower right. There just isn't enough information in that area from which to discern what it's actually supposed to look like.

Auto-tracing (in centerline mode) would have a little bit more success in the rest of it (the regions which are obviously just meant to be perpendicular straight lines). But even that would need more manual clean-up work than would be required to just trace it manually with the Line or Pen tool.

JET