i'm beginning to feel guilty about them buying me adobe streamline. sure sure its a drop in the bucket on an expense form.. but i've started to kick myself when i even think about using it.

there was a time in my life when this program would pull me out of a deep, dark hole.. but those days are memories near forgotten. i got it for rendering logos of our clients when someone hands me a buisness card and says 'scan this, we want to use it on our presentation in a couple hours on the 9 foot by 5 foot projector screen'. i'd take the godawful bitmap, make it a vector, and stretch it to fit on a billboard. or, i'd use it for taking my sketches or some old CAD drawings and giving them new digital life. i also used an.. a.. uh.. 'educational' version of the program. then we bought it. 150$ later, i havn't been able to get anything of value out of it and after an hour of trial and error conversions, i end up dragging that crappy bitmap into illustrator and tracing the thing myself. i might add i've gotten extremely good at matching up typefaces.

so here is where it bites me the most. this program is better suited for a plug-in to photoshop rather than a 150$ 4-meg download. common prodeedure is, you save an uncompressed tif file, bring it up in streamline, and whack at it till you get a nice vector file that works. well you can save yourself some time by simply posterizing it in PS, and hitting it with a filter. if it was my money i'd be a little pissed if i had never used the program before. plus, there are other free programs out there spacifically for vectorzing graphics or CAD drawings.

what's the dillio? guess i'd make this thread worth its bandwidth but asking: anyone use this program, and what methods have worked the best for you?