Would you like to continue?” With a simple outline drawing, you can just click OK, because lowering the resolution will probably not make any noticeable difference in speed. If you’re converting a high-resolution scan, you’ll get a warning – “Tracing may proceed slowly with this large image. For my cartoon scans, I’ve been selecting the “Comic Art” Preset and have never had to alter any settings. This can save a lot of time and you’ll probably be a lot happier with the results. Select the Preset that most closely describes the art that you’re converting. By clicking the Live Trace button in the Control palette, the program will use the Default settings for Tracing, which will work fine for some black and white art.Ī better choice is to click on the arrow just to the right of the Live Trace button, which reveals a long list of Presets. To begin, select your placed pixel image. STEP 3: Jump Start Your Conversion with a Preset. Then go to File > Place, select your image, and click Place.

To begin the pixel-to-vector conversion process, open a new document (File > New). Cropping the scan to include only what is needed simplifies the entire clean-up and conversion process. It’s much easier to get rid of any dirt or minor problems in the scan using Photoshop’s Selection and Retouching tools rather than later on in Illustrator. STEP 1: Clean Up and Crop.īefore bringing the scan of the cartoon into Illustrator, it’s always a good idea to clean and crop the pixel image in Photoshop. I will discuss Placing the cleaned-up scan into Illustrator, using Live Trace Presets and Options, converting the Tracing object into a Live Paint Group, using Gap Detection, Expanding the Paint Group into vector, and adding color to finish up the cartoon. In this tutorial, I will be taking you through the actual steps that were used to convert one of these hand-drawn cartoons into colorized vector art. I use Live Trace every week to convert scans of an outline cartoon caricature that an artist draws by hand into a finished, four-color piece of art for a newspaper advertising campaign. Using this amazing new feature, you can quickly and easily achieve the finest tracing results possible.

With the introduction of Live Trace in Adobe Illustrator CS2, the process of converting pixel images into editable vectors has taken a huge leap forward.

Image trace illustrator