It doesn't know that the top of the A is pointed and that its legs are diagonal. It doesn't know that the distortion of the flowers and the shades of the lighting work together to describe the outline of a couch. You make settings to force it to 'take a closer look' and it obligingly re-creates the inaccuracies of the blotches. You see a few jagged edges that merely suggest a discrete shape and recognize it as the letter A.Īn auto-trace routine sees only blotches of color with absolutely no meaningful correlation. You see a repeating pattern of intricate colors which you recognize as flowers, distorted by visual perspective on compound surfaces, overlaid by a pattern of shadows and highlights, and you recognize it as a couch. LiveTrace knows nothing about what you perceive as a shape or an object, or an image. The auto-trace routine only sees the adjacent colors and tries to draw paths around them. You think of a region of similarly-colored pixels or related-color pixels as a particular shape. The 'image' you are talking about being distorted only exists in your human intelligence.

In a raster image, there is no shape to speak of, other than the rectangular bounds of the image. The autotrace routine doesn't know that the eye's pupil is round or that a football is symmetrical (thus, the 'distortion' you are taking about). There is no shape-detection intelligence involved. Autotrace routines (like Illustrator's so-called LiveTrace feature) try to automate that re-drawing by detecting regions of similarly-colored pixels. There is only redrawing what is represented by a raster image as paths, in the same sense that you can redraw an oil painting with a pencil. There is no 'translation' of a raster image into a vector graphic in the sense of translating a Corel Draw file into an Illustrator file. Generating a vector version of a raster image is not a 'conversion' in the sense of converting a TIF to a PNG. Strictly speaking, a true 'conversion' would be a grid array of vector rectangles, which would have no practical advantage whatsoever over a raster image. There is no 'conversion' between a raster image and a vector graphic. This is an attempt to help correct increasingly widespread gross marketing-driven misconception about what vector graphics is all about, in the context of auto-tracing routines.

Png to raster