I thought Live Trace in Adobe Illustrator CS3 was amazing.

There are a few paths you can follow to trace raster image into its vector equivalent. The best known are Live Trace in Adobe Illustrator, and Corel Trace.
What are their disadvantages? They are rather expensive, for one. And the results they are producing are good, but certainly we could use something better.

Ladies and gentleman, say hello to Vector Magic.



It's essentially an online application, that will take your raster image and vectorize (aka trace) it.
The quality of the conversion is stunning. You can also see comparison of the results from various tracing programs and Vector Magic.

Below you can see image before and after vectorization:



Here's the best part: it's a free software. You don't even have to download it or install. It only requires Flash enabled browser (the tool is created in Adobe Flex) and an image you want to convert!

"Heaven is here" you may want to say. We're not quite there yet - they still need to add recognizing gradients feature :)

However, the tool is great even as it is. And judging by the update dates we will definately see some fast progress    :)

UPDATE: As "Anonymous" pointed out, the service is not free anymore :(

Thank you, Anonymous :)

Designer's life is now even cooler

Most of you probably already know Adobe's online software Kuler. It can be used to easily create, save, share and export colour schemes. Exported schemes are importable for applications in Adobe Creative Suite 2 and 3.

Here's what Adobe Kuler looks like:


You can use this free software at http://kuler.adobe.com

But why am I mentioning it right now? Kuler is old news...
It's because Adobe released updated version of Kuler's desktop AIP that now works with Adobe AIR Beta 3 (formely Apollo). You can download it from Adobe Labs. Don't forget to install Adobe AIR first :)

After you install and run it, take some time to admire how dark and pretty it looks :D



Then, you will probably feel dissapointed because you cannot create new sets in it, only browse through those already published.

But fear not! Adobe has found the way to swetten things.
Go to Adobe Illustrator, choose Window -> Adobe Labs -> kuler, and you will find yourself enjoying kuler panel:

Isn't it kul? :)