Vector vs Raster

Raster images are built one pixel at a time and often look jagged. Sometimes they look great, but as soon as you increase the size of that image, it becomes very jagged.

A friend of mine was thinking of painting his son's room in a pirate theme. But none of the effeminate looking Johnny Depp pirates of recent. He's looking at the old click adventure/puzzle Monkey Island PC games. They have a digital projector that they would use to project an image on to the wall and then paint it. The problem with this is that since these games were made so long ago (the picture on the left was from the 3rd game) that they character graphics are very low quality (by today's standards) raster images.

So I have been vectorizing the image so that he could do this if he wanted to. A vector image is made of lines and fill colors. The lines are more commands to represent lines, so when the image is enlarged the lines scale to the size of the new image. The graphics retain their clarity.

The image here on the left is of the original character graphic on the left and the traced vector image on the right. This image is actually a high quality raster image, so if you try to enlarge it then even the better quality graphic on the right will get pixelly. This is a jpg image. A better file format for vector images would be pdf or png, depending on the planned use for the image. As far as I know, this is the only vector, or at least cleaned up, image of this character on the internet. I looked for a while and didn't find anything else that someone had made. I expect to find this file copied all over the net fairly soon. Maybe not. We'll see.