- #16 colors cannot convert raster to vector manga studio how to#
- #16 colors cannot convert raster to vector manga studio android#
- #16 colors cannot convert raster to vector manga studio series#
This is of course a spectrum, depending upon the complexity of your asset.
#16 colors cannot convert raster to vector manga studio series#
They’re terrible at encoding photographic type images where it’s harder to describe their contents as a series of shapes and it would likely be a lot more efficient to use a raster format (like webp). Suitabilityĭue to the nature of the format, vectors are great at describing some assets like simple icons etc. This is why I believe it is time for all apps to move to vector assets.
#16 colors cannot convert raster to vector manga studio android#
Today, Android devices are more powerful and come in a huge variety of screen densities. In Android’s early days, devices were less powerful and screen densities differed little. Vectors provide the aforementioned benefits but at the cost of being more expensive to render. This is the essential tradeoff of raster vs vector. Animated vectors, can’t make this optimization as their properties necessarily change requiring re-drawing.Ĭompare this to raster assets like PNGs which only need to decode the file’s contents, something which has been highly optimized over time. We’ll revisit this in a future post in this series on profiling these costs.įor static vectors, the drawing stage only needs to be performed once and can then be cached to a Bitmap. Similarly, more drawing operations will take longer to perform (and some are more expensive e.g. If you use very intricate shapes, it will take longer to parse this into a Path. These model objects then have to be drawn by executing Canvas drawing commands.īoth of these steps are proportional to the complexity of the vector and the type of operations you perform. Your vector file has to be read and parsed into a VectorDrawablemodeling the the paths, groups etc you declare. The steps involved in decoding a vector before rendering This illustration for example from the on-boarding flow of a previous year’s I/O app for example: While this might not sound like much, this was just for small iconography larger images (such as illustrations) would have larger savings. Vector assets are generally * more compact than raster assets both because you only need to include a single version, and because they compresses well.įor example here’s a change from the Google I/O app where we switched a number of icons from raster PNGs to vectors and saved 482KB. the Pixel 3 XL is 552dpi, somewhere between xxhdpi & xxxhdpi) so assets will often be scaled.īecause vector assets resize gracefully, you can include a single asset, safe in the knowledge that it will work on any and all screen densities. Note that many modern devices don’t sit on exact density buckets (e.g. With the trend for devices with ever higher density screens, app makers must keep creating, including and shipping ever larger versions of the same assets. This is why on Android we need to provide multiple versions of each raster asset for different density screens:Īndroid picks the closest larger density and scales it down (if needed). Scaling raster assets down tends to be ok (as you’re discarding information) but scaling them up leads to artifacts like fuzziness or banding, because they have to interpolate the missing pixels.Īrtifacts from (extreme) scaling up a raster image (left) vs a vector image (right) Raster assets however can deteriorate when you resize them. Vector images resize gracefully because they describe the image over an abstract canvas size you can scale this canvas up or down and then redraw the image at that size. Vector assets have 3 main benefits, they are: Vector graphics however describe the image as a series of shapes defined over an abstract canvas size. As such they’re defined at a particular resolution and don’t understand anything about their contents, just the color of each pixel. Most image formats (png, jpeg, bmp, gif, webp etc) are raster which means they describe the image as a fixed grid of pixels.
#16 colors cannot convert raster to vector manga studio how to#
But what exactly are they? What are their benefits? What are the costs? When should I use them? How do you create and use them? In this series of posts I’d like to explore these questions and explain why I think that the vast majority of the assets in your apps should be vectors, and how to get the most out of them. That’s why I’m a huge fan of using resolution independent, vector assets. Understanding Android’s vector image format: VectorDrawableĪndroid devices come in all sizes, shapes and screen densities.