If you know anything about digital photography, it is that images are saved in pixels. Digital pictures are a really complex version of pointillism. (Think of the painting by Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.) If you want to make the picture larger than it was when it was initially made, then the image will become fuzzy. Sometimes the quality becomes so bad that the image is lost.
I was looking at some pictures of my Mom when she was a young girl and I wanted to turn one into a large print. Fortunately, with a little bit of Digital Magic, I was able to transform an old 3 inch by 3 inch photograph into a large image for my wall.
Vector images use math to figure out how to render a picture. Vector images are different from pixel images because they can expand infinitely without losing their quality.
Original Scan Edited Photo
So, how did I do this transformation. First, I took the old photograph and scanned it with my digital scanner. Then I brought the photo into Photoshop where I cleaned up scratches, tears, and other marks. Once this was completed, I brought the image into Illustrator. In Illustrator is a Trace function. It has lots of amazing possibilities. One of the things you can do with it is create a vector image that looks very similar to the photograph, but will have a look that seems a little like a painting.
I was so ecstatic about the results of this picture.
If you have old photographs which need to be restored, or if you have images which you would like to turn into wall art, contact me and I will see if I can work some digital magic on them as well.