The results show that both traces are comparable in quality at these settings. The most interesting aspect of this comparison isn’t the comparable image quality of brand new software with relatively old software, but the practicalities of doing the tracing. Illustrator CS2 took 92 seconds to trace the image, and sent RAM usage through the roof. In fact, my 1 gigabyte of RAM was insufficient after a few retraces with different settings; Windows ran low on virtual memory causing my computer to crunch to a halt, requiring a restart! However, Xara at maximum quality settings took just 5 seconds to trace the image, and even after many re-traces used very little memory in comparison. When placed in the Xara document, the value of Xara Xtreme’s newly optimized code showed its necessity when maneuvering such a heavily populated group of objects. It seems that Xara are right when they claim that it is impractical to use any other software for such purposes. With such CPU intensive applications, even today’s technological advancements are no substitute for the highly optimized code practices of early software writing when hardware was very limited, and this still exist in Xara’s software today.

Now let's look at one more image. This image has a lot of gradual smooth changes in colour. Again these images were traced in both applications with the settings shown (for maximum quality traces). Live Trace took 30 seconds, Xara took just 8. Live trace also ate up a huge amount of memory.

The settings used to trace this image in both applications are shown above.  These settings were chosen to maximize the quality and accuracy of the traced image.

So to sum up, while Illustrator CS2’s Live Trace has a lot of bells and whistles and unique built in profiles, with a little effort, Xara’s venerable Bitmap Tracer can produce comparable results. And it can do it without bringing your CPU to its knees crying More Memory, More Memory.

If you have any comments or questions, click the Send email link below.

Xhris

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The Xara Xone Guest Tutorials ©2005 Gary W. Priester All rights reserved
Tutorials are for private use only. No text or images may be used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.