Turning an image into vector

The trace itself, in 6 steps

Trace a placed image with the Image Trace panel rather than the button alone, because the button applies a preset blind and the panel shows you what the preset did.

1. Place the source with File > Place, shortcut Shift+Ctrl+P. Use the largest version you have. A logo scanned or screenshotted at 200 px wide traces into rubble, while the same mark at 2000 px traces cleanly.
2. Select the image with the Selection tool, shortcut V. The Image Trace controls stay greyed out until a raster object is selected.
3. Open Window > Image Trace and pick a starting preset: Black and White Logo for a flat 1 colour mark, 3 Colors or 6 Colors for flat artwork, Line Art or Sketched Art for a drawing, High Fidelity Photo only when you know what you are doing with the result.
4. Adjust Threshold, Colors, Paths, Corners and Noise, opening the Advanced section for the last 3.
5. Click Expand in the Properties panel. Until you do, the object is a live tracing preview and not paths at all, which is why the Direct Selection tool appears to do nothing.
6. Ungroup with Shift+Ctrl+G, then clean up: select the white background shape and delete it, or use Select > Same > Fill Color to catch every piece of it at once.

What goes wrong at step 5 is the most common complaint about the whole feature. People adjust sliders, admire the preview, save the file and wonder later why the artwork cannot be recoloured. A tracing result that has never been expanded is still tied to the original raster image, so it travels badly and edits not at all.

The 4 settings that decide whether the result is usable

Four settings decide the quality of a trace, and the presets are only starting positions for them.

• Mode and Palette: Black and White for a logo or line art, Grayscale for a tonal drawing, Color for anything else. With Color selected, set Palette to Limited and use the Colors slider, which runs from 2 to 30. A flat logo needs 2 to 4. Asking for 30 on artwork that only contains 4 flat colours produces 26 colours of edge noise.
• Threshold: available in Black and White mode only, running from 0 to 255 with the middle at 128. Lower values keep less black, higher values keep more. This 1 slider does more for a scanned logo than everything else combined, because it decides what counts as ink and what counts as paper.
• Paths and Corners: Paths sets how tightly the traced outline hugs the original pixels, and Corners sets how readily a curve becomes a sharp corner. Push Paths high and you get a faithful trace with a punishing anchor point count. Pull it down and you get a smooth, smaller file that has quietly rounded off the detail.
• Noise: measured in pixels, this discards any area smaller than the value you set. Raise it to clear the speckle in a scan. Leave it low for fine detail, and check the result at 400 percent zoom, because noise removal takes small correct detail away just as readily as it takes dirt.

Two checkboxes in the Advanced section are worth knowing. Ignore White stops the trace generating a white background object, which saves the cleanup at step 6. Snap Curves To Lines straightens near straight curves, which is exactly right for a technical drawing and exactly wrong for a hand drawn mark. Clear the Preview checkbox while you work on a large image: with it ticked, every slider movement re-traces the whole picture, and on a 4000 px photograph that is the reason Illustrator appears to hang.

Cleaning up after Expand

Cleanup after Expand is where a trace becomes real artwork, and the anchor point count is the number to watch.

1. Ungroup with Shift+Ctrl+G, more than once if the result is nested.
2. Delete the background: click the white shape with the Selection tool, then Select > Same > Fill Color, then delete.
3. Run Object > Path > Simplify on the whole selection and pull the slider down until the shape starts to distort, then back off. A traced logo that arrives with 3000 points is usually correct at 200.
4. Merge the fragments that should be 1 shape using the Shape Builder tool, shortcut Shift+M, or the Pathfinder panel, shortcut Shift+Ctrl+F9.
5. Recolour with Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork, which maps every colour in the selection at once rather than making you click 40 shapes.

Check the result at the size it will actually be used. A trace that looks perfect at 25 percent zoom shows every wobbling edge on a 3 m banner, and the wobble is not in the original: it is the tracing engine following the compression artefacts in a .jpg. Trace from .png or .tif where you have the choice, because .jpg compression puts halos around every hard edge and the trace treats those halos as artwork.

When redrawing by hand is still faster

Redraw rather than trace in 4 situations, and the decision is worth making before you spend an hour on sliders.

• Type: traced lettering is shapes, not text, so it cannot be corrected, re-spaced in the Character panel or set in the real font. Identify the typeface and set the words again, which is the only route back to the controls described in Kerning and tracking, because a traced letterform is a path and carries no spacing values to adjust.
• Geometric marks: a circle traced from a photograph is a 60 point approximation of a circle. Drawn with the Ellipse tool it is 4 points and mathematically round.
• Print reproduction of a client logo: a trace of a low resolution copy is a copy of a copy. Ask for the original .ai, .eps or .pdf first, every time, because it usually exists. If the mark is going into a 40 page brochure rather than onto 1 artboard, settle the Illustrator or InDesign question before you trace anything, since the answer decides which file the logo has to be placed into.
• Photographs intended as illustration: the tracing engine can convert a portrait, and the output is a stack of hundreds of flat colour shapes that is slow to render, hard to edit and instantly recognisable as a trace rather than a drawing.

That last point is where a verdict of one click still needs a human. The operation is now trivial, the cleanup is not, and the difference between artwork and 12,000 anchor points is entirely in the settings you chose before pressing Expand. If you are following an older tutorial that calls the feature Live Trace and sends you to Object > Live Trace > Make, you are reading instructions written before the engine was rebuilt and renamed. The concepts carry over, the menu path does not, and the current one is Object > Image Trace > Make. That gap between a menu that moves and an idea that does not is why Illustrator, operation by operation is arranged by operation rather than by menu.

Where to go next

ILLUSTRATORIllustrator, operation by operationILLUSTRATORIllustrator or InDesignWhich one for the jobILLUSTRATORKerning and trackingKerning and tracking in Illustrator