If you’ve been dissatisfied with Adobe Illustrator CS2/3 Live Trace, or event CorelDRAW X4 Power Trace, you probably rely on an old version of of Adobe Streamline or, even worse, farm the work out to unreliable Indian companies for small change.

Well, I’ve stumbled on a better solution, built by Dr. James Diebel, an Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, called “VectorMagic” (ignore the terrible logo above as it’s not indicative of the software’s power…while you’re at it, ignore my bad pun of a Police song in the title of this post).

The software, initially developed and offered at Stanford (vectormagic.stanford.edu), is now available on a subscription-based system through Dr. Diebel and his developer friend, Jacob Norda (Creator of the Thumbnail Generator and 4D Projector).

Take a look at some of the examples on the site and I’m sure you’ll be as impressed as I was. The software, it’s assumed by Gary W. Priester and Kathleen Maher of Communication Arts, seems to “make its distinction between areas of color based on the entire shape, as opposed to a pixel at a time.”

Here’s a little info from VectorMagic.com:
It converts bitmap images to vector images with a few simple clicks. Just upload your image and we will guide you through the tracing of it. Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated. You can upload any of the standard bitmap formats (JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, PSD) and the results are delivered right away in EPS, SVG, PDF, and PNG.

But why not give it a try, now, for free, to see the awesome tracing control of an application that lives up to its name….magic!