Vectorize Your Images For FREE With Creative Fabrica Vectorizer

For many illustrators and graphic artists, vectorizing an image has been one of the most crucial skills to have. However, even with advanced skills, manually tracing an image to create a vector file can be a pain, especially when an image has complex details.

Fortunately, with the advancements of AI, several tools have emerged recently that can automatically convert an image into a vector file. In my opinion, the development of these AI-powered vectorization tools is a game-changer for designers. They save so much time and effort compared to the painstaking process of manual tracing.

In this article, I will be showing you a free tool from Creative Fabrica called Vectorizer which converts a JPG or PNG input into a vectorized image.

What is CF Vectorizer?

Vectorizer is part of the recently announced Studio tool from Creative Fabrica. It takes any raster-based image as input and generates a scalable vector graphics (SVG) file in a matter of seconds.

The speed and simplicity of Vectorizer is impressive. Other vector tracing tools I’ve used in the past like Adobe Illustrator required fiddling with multiple settings and took much longer to process an image.

How to use CF Vectorizer

Click on the “Open Vectorizer” button to get to the vectorizer tool’s dashboard. The user interface is pretty basic, with a drop zone at the top, a history section on the left, and a preview section in the center.

Upload your raster image by dragging and dropping it on the drop zone or clicking on the “Pick image to vectorize” button.

When your vector file is ready, you will receive an email notification. The “Access my vector” button in the email will take you directly to the vector result.

Alternatively, you can refresh the vectorizer dashboard to check the result.

On the left side is the original image and on the right side is the SVG version. There’s not much that you can do with the SVG file within the Vectorizer interface. Aside from the ability to delete and download, you can also add it to your Creative Fabrica Studio.

We have placed the vectorized image in your upload folder inside Studio. This means that for each design you have access to your vectorized images.

To access the images, click the “Go to Studio” button, or whenever you are in Studio, click “Uploads” and select the “Vectorizer” folder.

Inside Studio, you can continue modifying the vector image as needed. The integration between Vectorizer and Studio is seamless. I like how it keeps your original uploads together with the traced SVG files for easy organization and access.

More Examples

Here are some more example images and their vectorized versions:

How much does it cost?

Vectorizer is completely free to use — that is perhaps the best piece of information you’ll read in this article. Unlike some other tools that charge a fee or require a subscription, Creative Fabrica is generously providing Vectorizer at no cost.

You are free to cancel your subscription at any time. I’d recommend exploring their full collection of graphics, fonts, and tools — there’s a lot of great stuff to discover as a subscriber.

Let’s talk about the quality

To put it simply, the quality you’ll get with this free tool is decent. It does a good job overall of converting raster images to vector paths. However, it can struggle with very fine details like hairlines and intricate textures.

I’d say that CF Vectorizer is best suited for simpler graphics, logos, and illustrations. For complex photographs, you may still need to do some manual tweaking of the paths to get the best results. But for many vectorization needs, the output from Vectorizer will be more than sufficient.

I wish that Creative Fabrica would continue improving the backend algorithm to produce even higher-quality and more detailed vector images. I wouldn’t mind a somewhat longer processing time if it resulted in a more accurate trace.

Improvement suggestions

I wish that Creative Fabrica would continue improving the backend algorithm to produce even higher-quality and more detailed vector images. I wouldn’t mind a somewhat longer processing time if it resulted in a more accurate trace.

• An option to change the level of details to preserve. Having a detail slider or low/medium/high detail setting would make Vectorizer more versatile.
• Support for more image formats (JIFF, TIFF, BMP, etc).

Commercial use

A key factor for any tool used by professional designers is the licensing and usage rights. Fortunately, Creative Fabrica makes it clear that you are free to use the images you create in Studio however you want, including commercial projects.

All items made with Creative Fabrica Studio can be used however you would like.

You are allowed to sell, distribute, re-sell or share for free all designs made with Studio. This also include Print on Demand platforms, gifting and other personal or professional use. This is valid worldwide and in perpetuity.

However, you are not allowed to simply copy an existing graphic asset from Creative Fabrica, place it on a plain background, export it, and sell that directly.

Here are some great print-on-demand platforms off the top of my head:

1. Readbubble
2. Etsy
3. Displate
4. Printify
5. Teespring

You can also use them in other ways like using them as graphics for your website, social media, or digital products. The vector format offers great flexibility in how you can utilize the images.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m quite impressed with Creative Fabrica’s Vectorizer tool. Especially considering that it’s entirely free, the results it produces are more than satisfactory for most vectorization needs.

As for the quality of the app itself, it’s pretty basic but it works. I just hope they implement some, if not all of my suggestions above in future versions of the product.

While there is certainly room for improvement in terms of fine detail capture and some added features, Vectorizer is already an excellent choice for many vectorization projects. It’s only a matter of time before they start charging for the service, but while it’s free, I highly recommend checking it out.

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