Whenever we take photographs, the image generated are made up of pixels which are more or less square dots. When these type of images are magnified to a level of 7X zoom they dont look very good.  Oposite to this is Vector Art which represents images in terms of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon i.e. in short mathematical format. Thse vector images when zoomed to the same level dont blur out.

There are certain situations when you have bitmap, jpeg, png or  gif images which are pixel based and need to be converted to Vector image for high quality image at the same resolution when compared to another image type. We found one service, Vector Magic,  ( there could be more ) which allows you to convert any type of image to vector image.

Before we start I would like to mention that I am writing this because I liked the tool and are not paid for it. There are tools like Inkscape and Xfg which are vector editors and can be used as on option for creating vector image from scratch.

Vector Magic has both online and desktop tool and are both paid. I tried the online tool where you can do one conversion for free.  All you need is to uplaod the image ( I tired with PNG, you can try with bitmap for seeing more differences ) which wen under 3-4 steps collecting several inputs which assisted it to create vector image.

Vectorized Sample

The image on the left is the vectorized image. What you should notice is the difference in the geometry. Left has more accurate geometry than the left and hence can be strectehed in far better way than the image on the left which looks pretty but not at every resolution.

Take a look at the image below where it is zoomed to a high level and you can see the difference between the clarity.Here left image is the original and right is vectorized image.

Comparison of vector and normal image

The process of vectorization image is very simple. It asks for the quality of image and then colour combination it has. This helps the engine to determine how it can draw the geometry and colors it can use.

Quality of original Image

However I am still looking for some free tools which can do this or may be close enough. Do you have any to suggest ?