Learn how to convert a raster image into a vector image using Adobe Illustrator's Image Trace tool, and understand the advantages and limitations of this process. The article also provides insight on how to modify a vector image after its creation, illustrating the process with a practical example.
Key Insights
- The article explains the process of converting a raster image, which is comprised of pixels, into a vector image using Adobe Illustrator. This conversion allows for image modification, unlike with raster images.
- Adobe Illustrator's Image Trace tool provides several presets and advanced options to customize the conversion. However, it could produce less clean results when applied to images of lower quality or those with non-distinct lines.
- While the article shows how to manually modify the vector image after conversion, it also indicates that this could be a time-consuming task, particularly for a complicated image.
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In this video we'll begin our final project. So let's begin by opening up our first file, going to file, open, and this time rather than opening up an illustrator file, we're going to be opening up a jpeg, a raster image, right within illustrator.
And we'll click open. If we zoom out, we can see our raster image. A raster image, unlike a vector image, is composed of pixels.
Pixels are the small squares of color that make up our image. In this case, we can see all of the different pixels that make our image. Unfortunately, with a raster image, we can't modify this and therefore we'll want to convert it into a vector so we can modify our lines and image.
In order to convert this raster image into a vector image, we're going to select it and we'll go to image trace on within our properties or our control panel. Selecting image trace, we'll see that our image automatically is transformed into a preview of a vector. To look at the details of this conversion, we can go into our image trace panel and here we'll see the details.
Up top, we have different presets, everything from default to three colors, and as we go through different presets, we'll see that they have different attributes. In this case, let's select black and white logo and we'll see our computer works to create the vector image using these details. From here, we can also modify our view from tracing result to tracing result with outlines and this will show us the paths we can work with.
We can select just outlines or any of the other details. We can also adjust our advanced details by toggling the advanced drop down and change things like paths or corners or noise. We can also select one of two methods with overlapping shapes or with shapes that have cut out paths and finally we can ignore white.
Ignoring white can be helpful when we have an image on a white background. However, in the case of this, we actually want to keep our white windows. So let's now close this and look at the preview of our vector image.
If we zoom in, we'll see that while this has created a vector image, it's not a very clean image. Our windows are sometimes a little broken. These distinct lines don't look very good and so this shows one of the downsides of using image trace.
Let's zoom back out. Using image trace on an image that's not as high of quality sometimes doesn't provide as good of results. Things like distinct lines, minimal colors, and high pixels often help to create a better image.
However, in the case of this one, it's pretty complicated and not all the lines of the original image are specifically distinct. Higher pixels may be more helpful to have a more clear vector image when we create it with image trace. In order to solidify this change, we can select expand and now we've created our vector image.
We could go in and modify things like our windows and select them double-clicking and maybe we would use our direct selection tool A to try and flatten each of these windows. We'll bring the handles in and in here. However, as we can see, this would be a lot of work to be able to do for our entire image and all of our windows.
So instead of using this vector creation, we're going to be using the original illustrator file for our course. Let's now close out this image file and we don't need to save it. In the next video, we'll begin working with our city within illustrator.
See you there!