Image Tracing in Adobe Illustrator

How would you like it if you knew how to convert your raster graphics to vector graphics, what i mean is how would you like to take your blurry pixelated image and change it to a better quality no pixelation image. Hey everyone welcome back to my channel, my name is Chris from Equalize Designz and in this post I will show you how to image trace in Adobe Illustrator. With this blog post I have a youtube video embedded where I show everything step by step. So the first thing you should do is to import your image in adobe illustrator, then what i do is i make a copy of the image by holding options for apple and alt for windows and i click and hold shift so i can drag it and keep them parallel.

After I duplicate the image I click on the image trace, and once you do that your raster graphic is no more now you have a vector graphic. In illustrator if you zoom in on the original image you see it getting blurry and pixelated but if you zoom in on the vector graphic it won’t get blurry. The reason why is because raster graphics work with pixels meaning that they are little boxes, and when you zoom in or if you have a small image you can see the pixelation and the blurriness, but vector graphics they work on paths meaning zoom in it’s not going pixelate. The next after clicking image trace is you want to click on the image tracing panel located near the image trace button, and this is where you edit it even more, so what I do most of the time is I bring the threshold up to 150 and if you click on the advance button this where you can alter the paths, corners and noise.

So both the paths and corners I bring up 85 and noise I drop down to about 12. So the last thing you want to do in panel is ignore white, and what that does is it gets rid of anything white in the image. After that you can close the panel and while the image is selected click on expand, ok so say you want add color to the image you're going to do one or two things. The first thing I did was black and white so if I want to color the image the only colors i would be able to use is black grays and white, what your going to need to is go to the color panel click on the top right button and change the color to either RGB for web or CMYK for print if image trace using color you just start adding color by using the live paint bucket and selecting each part you want colored. If have any questions please place your comment below, thanks for reading our blog post and check out the next post.