{"course":{"slug":"vector-and-print","title":"Vectors, Logos and Things That Get Printed","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/vector-and-print","level":"beginner","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"redrawing-from-a-photograph","title":"Rebuilding a mark that only exists as a photograph","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/vector-and-print/redrawing-from-a-photograph","position":17,"of":73,"minutes":9,"answer":"Reconstructing a logo from a photograph is measurement, not tracing: correct the perspective, lock a dimmed template, identify the typeface and the underlying primitives, redraw with shape tools, then verify with an overlay.","keyIdea":"Reconstructing a logo from a photograph is measurement, not tracing: correct the perspective, lock a dimmed template, identify the typeface and the underlying primitives, redraw with shape tools, then verify with an overlay, a flip and a 16-pixel test."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## The job you will actually be given\n\nA client has a logo. It exists on a printed visiting card from 2009, a shop board, and a WhatsApp forward at 480 pixels wide. There is no file. Nobody knows who made it. They want it on a hoarding next week.\n\nThis is one of the most common paid jobs in the trade, and there is a method.\n\n## Step one: get the best source you can\n\nRank what they can give you:\n\n1. **The original artwork file**, if anyone still has it. Ask the previous printer: small shops keep CDR files for years and will often hand them over.\n2. **A printed piece you can scan.** A visiting card at 1200 dpi on a flatbed is enormously better than any photograph. Ask them to courier one.\n3. **A flat, square-on photograph** in even light. Not at an angle, not in sunlight with a shadow across it.\n4. **The 480 px WhatsApp image**, which is where most jobs start.\n\nEven at (4) you can work, because you are not going to trace it. You are going to *measure* it.\n\n## Step two: correct the perspective\n\nA photograph of a shop board is a trapezoid. Fix it before you draw, in GIMP or Photopea, both free:\n\n- GIMP: Tools ▸ Transform Tools ▸ Perspective. Drag the four corners onto the four corners of the sign.\n- Photopea: Edit ▸ Free Transform, then **Ctrl+drag** a corner handle.\n\nThen Levels, so the ink is black and the board is white, and rotate so the baseline is horizontal. Five minutes here saves an hour of drawing something slightly skewed.\n\n## Step three: lock it as a template\n\nPlace the image on its own layer. Set the opacity to about 30%. **Lock the layer.** In Inkscape, Layer ▸ Add Layer, then the lock icon in the Layers dialog; in Illustrator, the Layers panel's lock column and *Template* option in the layer's options, which also dims it automatically.\n\nLocking is not optional. An unlocked template gets selected and nudged, and you will redraw everything against a reference that has moved.\n\n## Step four: identify what it is made of, before drawing anything\n\nLook at the mark and answer three questions.\n\n- **Is the type a known typeface?** Upload the image to a font identifier, or look at distinguishing letters: the **g**, the **a**, the **R** leg, the terminals. If you can identify it, set it as live type and you are 80% done. If you cannot, ask whether it was ever meant to be that face, or whether it was hand-drawn.\n- **Which parts are primitives?** Circles, squares, arcs, regular polygons. Draw these with the shape tools, not the pen. The 2009 designer used the same tools you have.\n- **What is the construction?** Is the swoosh a circle with a wedge removed? Is the monogram two letters overlapped? Find the underlying geometry and build it that way.\n\n## Step five: draw, then verify against the original\n\nDraw over the template with primitives, booleans and the pen. Then check, in this order:\n\n1. **Overlay test.** Put your version at 50% opacity directly over the original at 100%. Every edge should coincide. Where it does not, fix yours, or decide deliberately to improve it and tell the client.\n2. **Flip test.** Mirror your version horizontally and look at it. Asymmetries you stopped noticing become obvious.\n3. **Small-size test.** 16 px, black on white.\n4. **Node count.** Under fifty for a typical mark. If you are at two hundred, you traced when you should have drawn.\n\n## What to tell the client\n\nBe straight about two things.\n\n**It will not be identical.** A reconstruction from a photograph is your best reading of somebody else's geometry. Curves will differ by a fraction of a millimetre. Say so before you start, and show the overlay so they can see how close it is.\n\n**You are redrawing, not inventing.** The rights in the original mark belong to whoever owned them; redrawing it for the same owner is ordinary practice. Redrawing somebody *else's* mark for a new client is not, and it is a trademark problem rather than a technical one. If the brief smells like that, ask who owns it.\n\n## Charge for it properly\n\nThis is skilled work with a clear deliverable. Two to four hours for a typical mark, plus the delivery pack. Clients routinely expect it free because \"you just have to copy it\". It is the opposite of copying: it is reconstruction from evidence, and it is worth saying so once, politely, in the quote."},"check":{"question":"A designer rebuilds a logo from a 480-pixel WhatsApp image by running it through Image Trace at a high fidelity setting and cleaning up a few nodes. The result looks right on screen. Why is this the wrong method even though the output is vector?","options":[{"text":"Image Trace cannot handle images below 600 pixels, so the output is an approximation rather than a true trace.","correct":false,"tempting":"Tracers run happily at any resolution. The problem is not a size limit in the algorithm but what the algorithm is inferring from a blurred, compressed source."},{"text":"The trace turns compression blur and the pixel staircase into real geometry, so circles are not circular.","correct":true},{"text":"Traced output is always in RGB and must be converted to CMYK before printing, which shifts every colour in the mark.","correct":false,"tempting":"Colour mode is trivially changed and is unrelated to the geometry problem; a redrawn mark needs the same conversion."},{"text":"Image Trace embeds the source bitmap inside the exported SVG, so the delivered file still contains raster data at 480 pixels.","correct":false,"tempting":"A trace replaces the bitmap with paths; the source is discarded unless you ask to keep it. The inherited error is in the path shapes themselves."}]},"prev":{"slug":"grids-guides-and-snapping","title":"Grids and snapping that help instead of fighting","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/vector-and-print/grids-guides-and-snapping"},"next":{"slug":"outline-the-fonts","title":"Why the printer asked you to outline the fonts","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/vector-and-print/outline-the-fonts"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Rebuilding a mark that only exists as a photograph', in Vectors, Logos and Things That Get Printed. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/vector-and-print/redrawing-from-a-photograph (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Rebuilding a mark that only exists as a photograph","courseTitle":"Vectors, Logos and Things That Get Printed","module":{"index":2,"slug":"drawing-curves","title":"Drawing curves people will pay for"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Reconstructing a logo from a photograph is measurement, not tracing: correct the perspective, lock a dimmed template, identify the typeface and the underlying primitives, redraw with shape tools, then verify with an overlay, a flip and a 16-pixel test.","hero":{"kind":"plate","image":null,"alt":null,"caption":null},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"the-job-you-will-actually-be-given","runs":[{"text":"The job you will actually be given"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A client has a logo. It exists on a printed visiting card from 2009, a shop board, and a WhatsApp forward at 480 pixels wide. There is no file. Nobody knows who made it. They want it on a hoarding next week."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"This is one of the most common paid jobs in the trade, and there is a method."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"step-one-get-the-best-source-you-can","runs":[{"text":"Step one: get the best source you can"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Rank what they can give you:"}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"The original artwork file","b":true},{"text":", if anyone still has it. Ask the previous printer: small shops keep CDR files for years and will often hand them over."}],[{"text":"A printed piece you can scan.","b":true},{"text":" A visiting card at 1200 dpi on a flatbed is enormously better than any photograph. Ask them to courier one."}],[{"text":"A flat, square-on photograph","b":true},{"text":" in even light. Not at an angle, not in sunlight with a shadow across it."}],[{"text":"The 480 px WhatsApp image","b":true},{"text":", which is where most jobs start."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Even at (4) you can work, because you are not going to trace it. You are going to "},{"text":"measure","i":true},{"text":" it."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"step-two-correct-the-perspective","runs":[{"text":"Step two: correct the perspective"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A photograph of a shop board is a trapezoid. Fix it before you draw, in GIMP or Photopea, both free:"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"GIMP: Tools ▸ Transform Tools ▸ Perspective. Drag the four corners onto the four corners of the sign."}],[{"text":"Photopea: Edit ▸ Free Transform, then "},{"text":"Ctrl+drag","b":true},{"text":" a corner handle."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Then Levels, so the ink is black and the board is white, and rotate so the baseline is horizontal. 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An unlocked template gets selected and nudged, and you will redraw everything against a reference that has moved."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"step-four-identify-what-it-is-made-of-before-drawing-anythin","runs":[{"text":"Step four: identify what it is made of, before drawing anything"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Look at the mark and answer three questions."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Is the type a known typeface?","b":true},{"text":" Upload the image to a font identifier, or look at distinguishing letters: the "},{"text":"g","b":true},{"text":", the "},{"text":"a","b":true},{"text":", the "},{"text":"R","b":true},{"text":" leg, the terminals. If you can identify it, set it as live type and you are 80% done. If you cannot, ask whether it was ever meant to be that face, or whether it was hand-drawn."}],[{"text":"Which parts are primitives?","b":true},{"text":" Circles, squares, arcs, regular polygons. Draw these with the shape tools, not the pen. The 2009 designer used the same tools you have."}],[{"text":"What is the construction?","b":true},{"text":" Is the swoosh a circle with a wedge removed? Is the monogram two letters overlapped? Find the underlying geometry and build it that way."}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"step-five-draw-then-verify-against-the-original","runs":[{"text":"Step five: draw, then verify against the original"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Draw over the template with primitives, booleans and the pen. Then check, in this order:"}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"Overlay test.","b":true},{"text":" Put your version at 50% opacity directly over the original at 100%. Every edge should coincide. Where it does not, fix yours, or decide deliberately to improve it and tell the client."}],[{"text":"Flip test.","b":true},{"text":" Mirror your version horizontally and look at it. 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