Adobe Illustrator’s live trace tool is an excellent way to create down and dirty vector art form a photo. It’s not perfect, but in a bind it’s handy. Simply place the photograph you want to trace in Illustrator and, with the image selected, locate the Live trace button in the “Image Info Bar” running across the top of the page and click “Live Trace”. Then, play with the “Preset” options and/or “Threshold” settings until you get the level of detail you want. Once you have your desired level of detail, click the “Expand” button to convert it into vector artwork.

I’ve noticed it is difficult to get the detail level right in just one pass or setting and have found a workaround. Create one level of detail for the larger or less detailed parts of the artwork. Then, create another completely new live trace image for the higher level details. Take the higher level details and overlay just those details on the lower level first image. This gives you both levels of detail in the one image, and works pretty good and quick in a bind.

Till next time…

David Lemm