Ilustrator Live Trace Tutorial

Live Trace is a great tool for converting rastered images to vector in Illustrator. I personally do not use this tool very often. I find that to create a true Illustration, the artwork should be done by hand and then traced in Illustrator using the pen or pencil tool.
However, I will run through this tutorial, because it is a nice shortcut to create stylized photographs.

1) With Illustrator open, place a rastered object into Illustrator. A raster file will be most commonly a jpg, png, gif, bmp. As you can see in the screenshot, I've set mine to have a shortcut of Apple+D. Refer to This Article for how to set your own keyboard shortcuts.

2) Now you have an image in your Illustrator document. With your image selected, go to Object>Live Trace>Tracing Options.

A shortcut for Live Trace can also be found on the Control Bar along the top of your screen. Click on the down arrow and then on "Tracing Options"



3) The pop-up box will give you many different options to choose from.
I like to arrange my screen so that I can see the image that I'm working on, as well as the entire pop-up box.



4) By adjusting the Tracing Options, you can achieve many different looks.
You can see what your final product will look like by clicking the Preview Button on the right side of the box. Be careful when you check this. If you have a complex image, or a slow(older) computer, it will take a while to render.


5) For this example, lets say I want a color image. I changed the "Mode:" to "Color" Then, I adjusted the "Max Colors". By adjusting this number, I found the correct value that gave me the result that I was looking for. Too many colors and it will look no different that the photograph. Too few colors and it will look like a bunch of blobs on the canvas. The value that I found to work best was "8". Then click the "Trace" button on the right-hand side.

6) Now I have an image that is vectorized. But what can I do with it now? When the image is clicked, it remains as a group, and the individual segments and pieces are not selectable. If this is fine with you, then you're finished. If you want to break the new image into alterable segments, read on.


7) With the image selected, go to Object>Expand. In the pop-up box make sure the "Object" box is checked.



8) You can see all of the paths for each individual shape. It looks like a nightmare to make any adjustments. This isn't the cleanest way to make illustrations, but it will get you by in a pinch.

Pantone Hotel

I want to take a trip to Brussels just so I can stay here.

T-shirt for Orphaned Animals

When Bucky was young screech owl he was plucked from his nest in the wild to become someone’s pet. Fortunately his captor was soon discovered and fined for his irresponsible and illegal actions.
Bucky never learned how to hunt and survive in the wild, and must rely on humans for his food and protection. He now lives at the Animal Rescue League’s Wildlife Center in Verona.
As an active volunteer, I wanted to help raise awareness and support for orphaned animals. I created a t-shirt design with Bucky on the front.
The shirts were so popular that the other volunteers at the Center purchased over half of the shirts! At the “Baby Shower” fundraiser event, this March, the shirts almost sold out. Learn more about the Wildlife Center or Screech Owls.

Literary Addition

Most of the posts thus far have been about design and the technicalities of the Adobe programs. I find blogs of this sort very useful when I can't find the shortcut in the program itself. I want to add to the database of information, help others, and make a contribution to the community that I find effective: user blogs.
However, I'd like to take a turn from the current path of tutorials, and dive into something deeper. I'd like to interject book critiques into this blog. I've thought about creating a new blog entirely, however, since books and literature are considered art, I feel that they have a place on this post also. Not only can a you find out about aligning decimals in InDesign, but you may also scroll past a book review that grabs your attention.

Many times we become sucked into our jobs and don't visit ideas outside our field. This comes back to my older post "Specialization vs Globalization. Sometimes creative blocks can be solved by inspiration from unlikely sources. In the past, I've been spurred into creativity by puddles of water, the seatbelt beep in my car, and wafting cat hair in my livingroom. Taking a look outside of our everyday "creative job" and looking into unrelated or other threads of creativity can often help kick start our sluggish days.

Flash ActionScript Resource

I have found this dictionary to be a resourceful tool for Flash.

Flash ActionScript Dictionary

If you need a refresher for Flash's syntax, this comprehensive list provides symbolic operators and ActionScript elements. Listed under each entry there are examples for how to use them.