Vector masking not good enough?

[Sarah356061648o5x]

I'm putting together a packaging design file to go off to external printers and used the vector mask option to convert some plain .png images into vectors for printing.

The printer has come back and said that vector masking isn't suitable and the images need to be converted to actual vectors? I'm quite new at this, so my limited understanding is I now need to remove all the .png images, edit them with the vector tool, save them as .svg vector files and then import them into the original design file. Is that correct or is there an easier way to do this? 

Thanks!

[Earth Oliver]

you'll probably need to use Illustrator if you want scalable vectors.

[Lumigraphics]

What is your workflow and what are you sending to the printer? And what are they doing with it?

Typically for packaging you would use Illustrator or InDesign. Logos and text would be natively vectors and not raster images.

[Sarah356061648o5x]

The printer sent me a template in the form of a pdf, so I opened it in photoshop (which I now know was a mistake) I have used photoshop to import standard .png images (logos, etc) then converted them using the vector masking tool which I had hoped would be good enough to satisy the printer. (They need to be vectors for hot foil stamping in print process.)

Unfortunately, I've never used illustrator before so now I have a flat one-layer design where fortunately all my text has auto-converted to vector but the original vector-masked images are just background noise which illustrator doesn't seem to be detecting as separate objects for me to trace and vectorise. 

Any magic tricks available or will I have to go in and re-do all the images in illustrator? 

[Lumigraphics]

Ask them to send you a template in Illustrator format.