I direct universal blessings to your artwork!
Happy Creating!!
Vectorize Anything with Image Trace
Create better quality vectors, faster.
Image Trace is one of the most useful tools for graphic designers, amateurs and digital artists.
For even those who are specialists using the Pen Tool, Image Trace saves valuable time.
And whatever saves time in the life of a designer, I consider GOLD.
Image Trace is not a tool you need to “master” to use.
But, if you work with Illustrator frequently, it is definitely a tool you must understand well to benefit from it fully.
That said, I want to share two tips that you won’t find anywhere else to help you create great quality vectors.
Tip #1: Pre-Editing
This is a trick I discovered by myself and found critical when the quality of the image, the colors, or the contrast is sub-par.
You must prepare the image in Photoshop and then take it into Illustrator.
Image Trace works by grouping similar pixels into shapes. If we can make these shapes more defined before opening Image Trace, most of the work is already done. This gives us a stunning vector result with less effort in less time.
In fact, it’s often not even possible to get a usable result without this method.
Here’s an example:
Tip #2: Medium Matters
You probably noticed that every type of image requires a different strategy to trace it. I recommend you practice with drawings, photography, icons and other types of artwork too.
Don’t wait until it’s crucial. Start practicing with the presets in Image Trace, and play with them until you get a feel for it.
Once you master each type of image, you will save a lot of time spent adjusting the settings and waiting for Illustrator to trace them.
So here’s the deal, putting in practice these two tips, you can easily take Image Trace to the next level.
Now, you could learn by yourself by choosing different types of artwork to PREPARE in PS and VECTORIZE in AI.
Or you can take a shortcut, and let me teach you all I know.
I have created an in-depth 48 min course where we prepare and vectorize three types of artwork: PHOTOGRAPHS, MARKER DRAWINGS and FOUND ELEMENTS (small online images of low quality).
I invite you to watch the intro video below, and see if it’s something worthwhile for you.
We’ll review all the settings in the Image Trace panel while playing around with an orange.
Once we understand what we are looking for in a photo, we’ll step into Photoshop and prepare the image using two methods, adjustment layers, and Camera Raw Filters.
We will jump into making our image into a vector, and getting a vector subject out of a raster image.
Marker drawings were made to be vectorized!! Chances are, you may not even need to pre-edit the images, but just in case we will learn how to make sure that image trace can do its best job.
We will turn the marker drawing my girlfriend made into a finished vector. Once we have this one-color vector, we can replace the fill with anything we desire!
In this lesson, we will quickly pre-edit some small images we found online, then make them high-quality vectors.
I want to give you this class for the price of 2 cups of coffee.
Vectorize Anything with Image Trace
- Diving Into Image Trace
- Photos Pre-Edits in PS
- Vectorizing Photos with Image Trace
- Drawings Pre-Edits in PS
- Vectorizing Drawings with Image Trace
- Vectorizing Found Elements
- Class Review
Explore my reviews as teacher here:
