Tutorial: Illustrator Tips – Using “Live Trace”

Anyone designing graphics has – or will – run into a situation where a client provides a logo in BMP or JPG format. These rasterized images simply do not scale well when large printing projects require hi resolution images. The worst is when the client uses the logo off the website and expects a full-size, full-color brochure to look professional.

Illustrator (CS2 and CS3) has a built in tool called “Line Trace” that literally traces these logos and creates a vector map. “Live Trace” is easy to use once you know what to look for. This tutorial will get you started with “Live Trace” so you can keep your customers happy.

1. Open a new document in Illustrator. Save the above image to your hard drive by right-clicking and select Save As. Go to File -> Place and put the image onto the canvas.

2. Right-click and copy (Ctrl + C) and paste (Ctrl + V) a copy onto the canvas. This will serve as a reference for you later if you want to add the colors.

3. With one of the images selected, arrange them so that the version you will be working on is in the upper left-hand corner. This is just to keep everything organized for the sake of this tutorial. The black lines on the page are simply the page markers and are not a part of the image.

4. Go to Object -> Live Trace -> Make.

5. You should now see a very rough sketch of your logo! Obviously, this is not ideal just yet, but that is the beauty of “Live Trace” – it’s live! We can edit it until we get it just right. Go to Object -> Live Trace -> Tracing Options.

6. Let’s take a look at some of these tools you have at your disposal. Always check the “Preview” box so you can see your results. You can create presets, but for now just use the default. The Mode should be Black and White. Set the Threshold to 176 and leave the rest of the settings as they are for this tutorial. Take the time to play with these settings at some point. Notice on the right side you can see the data about the trace with the number of paths, anchors, etc.

7. Now, to get the logo to have the same colors, we will use the “Live Paint” tool. Go to Object -> Live Paint -> Make and then grab your Paint Bucket Tool. You may be warned that using the Live Paint tool will prevent you from editing your trace. That is fine as you now have the hard, tedious part of converting the logo to a vector already done.

8. Hold down the Alt key and click on the main color of your rasterized logo. This will switch you over to the Eye Dropper Tool so you can sample the colors.

9. As you scroll over the traced portion of your logo, you will see bright red outlines to indicate where you will be painting. Just fill in all the areas you want filled at this point.

10. To get the outer stroke to look right, hold down the Alt key and sample the color of the stroke on the rasterized image.

11. Use the same method of painting the inner portion of the vector image, except only paint the stroke portion. The red outline only covers the stroke area instead of the inner portion you would have filled.

12. Now, just use the Direct Selection Tool to fine tune your vector version of your logo and you’re done!