converting .bmp or .jpg to vector

[Mark Gelinas]

Hey, folks, I'm having a great time using 2D images to create carvings, with excellent results, if I do say so myself. (See attached school of tuna and Woodstock poster) My problem is that when I scale up a, say, bitmap image in size, the sharpness of the edges gets lost and the image, and often some of the background, gets pixilated-looking. I use GIMP to clean up these areas but it gets really time intensive if I want the best results I can get.
I'd like to ask you what program(s) are your favorites to vectorize images from other formats- preferably free ones, as I am not working right now and hundreds of dollars are not available.

[James RS]

It all depends on the resolution of the original image, scaling up a small resolution image will do exactly what you are seeing jpegs will produce little spikes.
The recommended format to import is png

[Metalhead781]

I use paint.net. It's free but the main thing is i increase the drawing size soften then sharpen the image and finally turn it to gray scale and adjust the contrast. Once that's done the pattern editor likes it if u convert it back to color and mask it over with a dark orange color.

[hogiewan]

I have vector magic at work. It does a great job converting raster images to vector, but it is pricey

[Pomelle Sapele]

I'm using Illustrator. There is free program available to convert Illustrator .ai files into .mpc files. I don't know if you can do that with paint.net or vector magic.

[bjbethke]

I'm using Illustrator. There is free program available to convert Illustrator .ai files into .mpc files. I don't know if you can do that with paint.net or vector magic.
If you are speaking about ai2mpc, I have found it only works if you make the .ai file with Illustrator version 8. It also will not work with large files. It tends to lock up when you add the "V" bit or any other bit making the MPC.

Other than that it works great. The MPC for the ai2mpc file was too large to post.

The MPC that I posted was a JPEG cleaned up with Vector Magic, saved as a PNG file and made into a PTN with the CW Pattern Editor.