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Tracing Techniques for Illustrator

By Technology Last updated Tuesday, May/21/2024

Live Trace

With Adobe Illustrator's Live Trace function, you can build new artwork by auto-tracing existing graphics. Use this tool to create a drawing based on a photograph or turn a scan of a cartoon sketched on scrap paper into editable artwork. With Live Trace, you can recolor your output with a new palette of colors, limit colors to produce a posterized result, build a set of color swatches from your traced artwork and minimize the complexity of the traced result. You can convert Live Trace's output into regular Illustrator paths and apply further techniques to the traced graphic.

Bring a photo or other image into Adobe Illustrator as a template, and the program screens back the image so you can see what you draw on top of it. Illustrator automatically locks template layers so you don't accidentally move your tracing while you redraw over it. You can recognize an Illustrator document layer that serves as a template because its listing in the Layers panel displays a special template icon where the visibility eyeball usually appears.

You'll have better luck tracing a graphic or logo if you set a stroke weight and color for your work rather than relying on the active-path display to show you where you're drawing. An active path shows up as the slenderest of hairline rules and can be all but invisible on top of complex artwork. Especially if you're tracing fine details but also for general precision, set your document view to a high magnification so you can see exactly what you're doing. The size and complexity of your artwork determines how closely you need to view it while you work.

If you're expecting Live Trace to produce a faithful vector rendition of a portrait, you won't be happy with the results you achieve. Even tracing algorithms as sophisticated as those in Adobe Illustrator can't process all the nuances of a continuous-tone image into a vector result. If the program could do that, the artwork created would require so much memory that you wouldn't be able to manipulate your work, let alone save and print it.