Hello,

My company uses China based companies to manufacture enamel
badges,usually repro's of historic emblems.

We send them a photograph of the original (in macro close-up), as
detailed as it can be
(face on, of course) and they then convert it to outline
artwork...including all wording and emblems, motifs and swirls etc
etc.

They could not possibly reproduce this by hand, as it would take
forever and cost us a fortune (and it takes an hour or so and costs
little for the service)....so how do they do it? IE What software
and what techniques do they use (any tuition sites on the web?).

I have Googled up on how to convert photos to outline art, but they
merely (in the main so far) have demonstrated how to make a photo look
like it was 'sketched' in pencil...the art we get is like an exact
replica of the emblem, but in line/outline mode (and not like a pencil
sketch!).

We use Photoshop and Illustrator, but 99% of work is outsourced.

Hope somebody can help!


Mike

If the artwork you are getting is raster, try opening your photo in
Photoshop and go to Filter>Stylize>Find Edges. Once you have lines for
each of the edges you can convert the image to greyscale and play with
contrast to drop  out extraneous grey tones. Another way to do it,
with a much finer effect is to go to Filter>Stylize>Trace Contours. A
one pixel line is drawn around each contour detected in the image.

If you finished art is vector, then they may be using a program such
as Adobe Streamline that finds the edges and turns them into vector
information. Google "raster to vector" to find additional products the
perform this function.

Good luck!

Adobe Streamline does convert raster to vector, but frankly it does
not do a very print-ready job on detailed raster files.
A better result can be achieved by importing the photo into an
illustrator file.Make the layer it's on  a template. Create a new
layer in illustrator, above the image layer. Then redraw the image,
re-set any type if you have the font or redraw the type (ugh!) if you
don't, using the image on your template layer as a guide. Yes it does
take quite a while on complex images, depending on the skill of the
illustrator operator.
The company I work for also sends products to China for manufacture,
my experience is that labor is not a huge factor in product cost, even
if the job is very labor intensive from our perspective. On one
project, when we complained about irregular edges on  the first
shipment of product, we were informed that it was because the product
was being trimmed to size by hand, with scissors. The order was for
~10,000 parts!!!!.  (We asked them to buy a die cutting machine and
cutting dies, but the price was not higher for the hand-trimmed
variety).

--
amiable_feline