I am trying to develop a logo from this image.

The logo will be used in a variety of media, including large banners. Therefore, I assume a bitmap is not appropriate as final art because it can't be scaled up. Or can it? Is there a way to scale up bitmaps without having big-ass jaggies?

So I was thinking of importing the bitmap into Illustrator and turning the image into vectors as much as possible (using whatever command that is that draws lines along bitmap contours). However, I am a complete novice at Illustrator and am not looking forward to doing this.

Can anyone suggest a better way?

There's a little known program by Adobe called Streamline, which will take pixel based or rasterized images and turn them into Illustrator or vector files. You might want to try that.

The trace tool in Illustrator isn't as good as Streamline. You could make a color selecton in PSD & save the paths to Illustrator also.

If the above file is all you have it will be hard to get anything usefull out of Streamline by the way (Flash does have a trace function too, if you can not find SL). Because at the highest setting it will trace the sparse information and create vector representations of the pixels. Which will get you the same effect when enlarged as a bitmap. Automatic tracing needs a lot of information to create straight lines, like the white inside the gun. In that case old fashioned handywork will be the solution. (no magic command or keystroke then). I suppose the logo is not for a big kinda fast food corporation or a home for the elderly? (is it David Carradine or am I seeing things?)

Well, I played around with it more last night and decided I don't need a vector drawing. I guess I'll just do this the old fashioned way: have a variety of different sizes available for different uses (the way I used to do things back when I was a graphic designed in the early eighties). The AutoTrace tool in Illustrator is nifty, but a pain in the neck when applied to this design. I imagine Streamline will be similar. Instead, I experimented with enlarging the image in Photoshop, and then applying the Median filter. With the pixel radius set to 5, you can use Median to smooth out the jaggies after a blow-up of 500%. It works very well. As an example, the image on the left is my guy's face at 100% of the working size. On the right is his right eye after a 500% blow-up and the Median filter applied with a radius of 5. I have no doubt I could blow it up again and apply the filter and it would look great. In fact, it cleans things up so much I might blow the image up to max and then reduce it to the final sizes, rather than the other way around. The image is an early draft of a logo for my new company. We will manufactur tactical accessories for shotguns and other firearms.

It has done the trick on lot of my occasions. Old-fashioned vectordrawing on the enlarged file will get you the best file in the world, but it takes a lot of time. I did the Streamline trick on enlarged originals a lot and that can be an enhancement too. It is much better than the tool in Illustrator. Enlarging with the app S-Spline can get even better results by the way. Anyway, good luck with it!

Once you have a good contrast on your b-and-w pic, use the selection tool, then convert the selection to a path. The path can then be cleaned/prettied up and exported as a vector file which can be scaled to any size.

I just downloaded Streamline and gave it a try. Whoa. That's exactly the effect I want, with no effort. So all I have to do now is clean up the raster image a bit before vectorizing it.

why not do it the old fashioned way and just trace it by hand in Illustrator using the Raster file as a template. it shouldnt take but an hour or so. sure will save time. cheers.