Add flair to your artwork with Illustrator’s Live Trace tool

 Feb 06, 2014

In a recent post, Give your line art the outline it’s missing in Photoshop, we demonstrated how to create a custom shape and refine its outline in Adobe Photoshop. Today, we’ll take a look at how to, similarly, create pop-art imagery in Adobe Illustrator‘s Live Trace tool (CS4 and CS5), or also known as the Image Trace tool (CS6). For the purpose of this post, we’ll be using the CS4 version and will refer to the tool as Live Trace. Illustrator’s Live Trace feature makes it easy for you to re-invent your raster art by creating workable vector line art. This is a great way to create the stylised line art associated with pop art. Live Trace has preset options to convert images into black-and-white line art.

How to use the Live Trace tool

  1. Select your raster art file and open with Illustrator.
  2. Select the art and go to the ‘Object’ tab in the File Menu.
  3. Find ‘Live Trace’ and select ‘Tracing Options.’
  4. In the pop-up box, change the Preset from ‘Default’ to ‘Black And White Logo’ and click Trace.
As seen in the example below, you’ll notice that the colours have changed to black and white, and the lines are more refined and sharper. Live Trace in Adobe Illustrator If you want to manipulate the art further in Illustrator, go to ‘Object’ and select ‘Expand.’ After you’ve made your changes, you can open this file in Photoshop, and use one of the painting or drawing tools to continue to enhance the artwork.

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New Horizons  

New Horizons is Australia’s leading corporate training provider, and has been educating business professionals for over 15 years in the areas of Professional Development, Microsoft Office & Adobe Applications, and IT Technical. Our aim through this blog is to bring you relevant stories, articles, and tips & tricks that can help you to improve your skills and productivity in the workplace. Our expert trainers will also be posting their own articles from time to time, so be sure to keep an eye out.

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