Adobefilter: PSD -> EPS converted to outlines

April 10, 2007 1:52 PM

I've got an Adobe Photoshop PSD file of my company logo. We've got a vendor making swag for us that needs the file as an Illustrator EPS file converted to outlines. Converting to EPS is fine, but I'm stumped on finding a way to get the outlines. Help, fellow nerds, Help!
posted by mattoly to computers & internet (11 comments total)

What kind of swag? If it's pens or something else where the logo is small you can select the major design elements one at a time and convert the selections to paths. Then open the .psd up in Illustrator, making sure to preserve the paths, and do further clean up there.

The best way to do it is to just recreate the logo from scratch in Illustrator. Import the .psd and trace i with the pen tool. You might get OK results using Live Trace, but I wouldn't count on it.
posted by lekvar at 2:00 PM on April 10, 2007

If he's talking about converting text to outlines, then selecting your type layer(s) and doing Layer > Type > Convert to Shape should do the trick.
posted by chrismear at 2:03 PM on April 10, 2007

Conversion from vector (outline) EPS to (bitmap) PSD is process that loses information. You can't automatically go back in the opposite direction.

Your best bet is to go to the designer who originally designed the logo, and ask them for the original illustrator file. If that's not possible, then recreating it ala lekvar's suggestion is your solution.
posted by alms at 2:04 PM on April 10, 2007

Can you link to your logo? Getting an idea of what it looks like would help me be more specific.
posted by lekvar at 2:07 PM on April 10, 2007

If you feel lucky you can type your company name into this site and see if you get any results. It has saved me from remaking countless logos.
The other trick is if your company is publicly traded you can pull up annual reports, zoom in on the company logo.. if it doesn't go pixelated then its vector and you can just import the PDF into Illustrator.
posted by Pink Fuzzy Bunny at 2:10 PM on April 10, 2007

I'm no expert, but there is a function in photoshop called "Convert to Path", which takes a selection you've made and converts it to a vector path which can then be exported to illustrator, etc.

If you can select different elements of the logo, and convert each selection to a path, you'll have a layered set of vectors which can be made into a nice EPS one way or another.

Sorry I can't be more specific - look in the help file!
posted by Aquaman at 2:25 PM on April 10, 2007

Aquaman, if he did that, he'd have the outlines of the logo but none of the fill. Now, that might work if the logo is very simply geometric, but otherwise there is no easy way to do this.

Your logo was probably (hopefully) not created in Photoshop. While there are some marks out there that are appropriately made with this software, the vast majority of logotypes are (or should be) created using vector drawing software, like Illustrator or Freehand. You can go from vector to raster, but you can't go back.

Can you get the original art for your logo? It may already be in a vector format (i.e. AI, vector EPS, PDF etc).
posted by luriete at 2:59 PM on April 10, 2007

Seconding luriete -- the logo probably wasn't originally a raster image. If you can't track down the original vector file, you're in for a lot of work and will probably still get a crappy result for your trouble.
posted by jjg at 3:30 PM on April 10, 2007

Vector -> Raster = happy designer
Raster -> Vector = sad designer
posted by Area Control at 3:51 PM on April 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

Holy crap, Pink Fuzzy Bunny, thanks for the Brands of the World link!
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:35 PM on April 10, 2007

Civil_disobedient: You are most welcome. I should have mentioned though, I have been finding that not all the logos are current, and not all the colors are correct, so caveat emptor...
posted by Pink Fuzzy Bunny at 8:00 PM on April 10, 2007