Illustrator :: How To Exclude Transparent Areas In Image Trace
May 9, 2012
I have a logo file, saved as PNG, that is black on transparent. Very simple file, just stylized black lettering on a transparent background. In Illustrator CS5, I can place that file, do a "Live Trace" in "Lettering" mode, and Illustrator will correctly ignore the transparent areas when I expand the trace. After expanding, I'm left with scalable paths and an easy way to change the fill color to have the logo work with my background.
Fast forward to Illustrator CS6. I try to do the same thing but a) there is no "lettering" preset for Image Trace and b) there is no setting I have yet found to cause Illustrator to ignore the transparent areas when I expand. If I then fill, everything inside the bounds of the placed image (the square containing the logo) is filled with that color. The only way I've found to get similar results is to go through the layers panel after the Expand and deselect each piece of the image that should not be filled. I have a hard time believing this is the desired approach.
I've got a little graphic that I'm working on at the moment. I am trying to trace it using the Image Trace feature in illustrator.
Everything's hunky dory apart from the fact that the original graphic has a lot of white features on it that I want to preserve. These white bits are not bordered so, in the main page of illustrator, they merge with the white background. When I go to use Image Trace, I can either select "Ignore white" which leaves out all of this white detailing, or I can deselect it which means that the trace then includes the white background and the whole image is set into an annoying box.
how I can remedy this? I know in Photoshop, there's that checked background that shows when your work surface is empty. Is there a way of getting this same thing in Illustrator?
I'm loving CS6 Illustrator, except for one thing. Image Trace. Here, Adobe seem to have taken away the two most usefull settings from Live Trace, and replaced all the presets with ones that are pretty much unusable. I almost always used either 'Comic Art' or 'Lettering' to trace hand-drawn images, but they're both gone. None of the new settings are good enough, even if I make a custom one. The main issue is that the sliders in Image Trace are for completely different things to those in Live Trace, so it's difficult to translate one set of settings into the other.
With Image Trace, I cannot get the same results as with Live Trace, and so far, have found myself having to have Illustrator CS5 open at the same time as CS6, just so I can get workable traces.
I don't know if it's possible, but is there any way to import the presets from Live Trace, or even the full tool, into CS6, to replace the new Image Trace presets?how to make the equivelant of Comic Art in Image Trace's new settings?This is a close up of a file I was trying to trace, showing the major difference in quality between the two CS versions.
Left: CS5 - Comic Art setting. Right: CS6 - This is a custom setting, but is the closest I have come to Comic Art thus far.
As you can see, the definition of Image Trace is far lower in quality than Live Trace, giving me one large connected blob of colour rather than the distictly separate lines produced in Live Trace.
I just started using CS6, jumping from CS3. A major tool I use is Live Trace, and I have custom settings for that. I cannot find a way to make Image Trace behave the way Live Trace did for black and white line drawings. The results I get in CS6 are far inferior to those I got in CS3 in terms of retaining the look of the original raster image. Otherwise, I will have to leave CS3 installed just to do my Live Trace.
Here is a sample of what I mean. You can see the quality degredation in CS6 compared to CS3. (And it's much more obvious when it's full size and full resolution.)
My settings used in Live Trace (CS3) were:
The settings I tried in CS6 that gave the above result were:
I managed to get my logo to white and looking nicely but when I try to create a border around it it doesn't look sharp. I am selecting the text, growing by 1 or 2 pixels around and filling a second layer with black and exporting as PNG (to maintain tranparency). You can see what the finished product looks like at [URL]..... in the slider on the main page. It does not look sharp at all. how to do this in a cleaner looking manner?
If there is a tool or plug in, or effective technique for copying the translucent areas of an image?
This is an original image [URL]......
[URL].......
This is the image I cut out, then added blurs by using color selection and then brushes, and the blur and motion blur tool, but its not an exact copy of the translucent areas.
I need to cut out an image from a transparent background. Is there a way to do that with Photoshop Elements 10?
In other words, I have an image (say a face) that is on a rectangular background that is transparent. I need to cut away all the transparent area so there is NO background, just the face, and an irregular shaped image. Is that possible with Photoshop?
This is for inserting the image in another program (Sketch Up) which does not always allow transparency.
How do I make the white areas inside this logo transparent? I can't seem to find a way to do it and I would like to so it can be put onto different coloured backgrounds. The semi-cirlces are all seperate shapes, the white circle outline is a white cirlce with a smaller blue circle placed on top and the text is normal text on the blue circle.
In illustrator, I have placed an image that I created in photoshop. Once I trace and expand it, with the option to ignore white selected, there are still transparent shapes that I have to manually delete. For what I am doing now, it is way too tedious to have to do that. Why, if I'm 'ignoring white' so that I simply get a black/transparent vector image, are these transparent shapes showing up?
Illustrator cs6 - I have used image trace to create a 3 colour image of a photograph. Is there a way to create layers based on the three colours? (One layer for each of the three colours)
how to use Live Trace in Illustrator but now instead of the Tracing Options window having a button that says "Trace" it's now showing a button that says "Set to Default." I'm sure something isn't selected right or something similar, but I can't figure it out. why "Trace" is no longer an option?
I have been able to do this in the past, but today illustrator cs6 will not let me do an image trace. I go under window, then over to image trace and it shows up, but it is light and it can't be opened. I also tried going under Object, then to Image Trace and the same thing.
I'm trying to outline an image. In photoshop, I did find edges (save), then opened the image in illustrator and did image trace. I obtained a perfectly outlined image.I can't obtain the same results using illustrator image trace alone.I've adjusted the advance settings a few times to get the same result but with no luck. Threshhold and corner settings are ok, but I'm getting more paths and noise than I want, with the settings at low/1 respectively.I also tried the gray scale setting since the image is mostly gray, expand, etc, but no dice).
i used to trace QR-Code images because I often need them as scalable vector data. That worked nearly perfect in the old versions. I just had to to a little clean-up to some corners but every anchor-point was perfectliy in place. The new Tracer in CS6 places the anchor-points not at the "Black-Square-corners" of the original image. The attaced image shows the Tracer-Preview and settings. The orange points indicate the not correct traced areas.
I'm just now getting into using illustrator (currently on trial for illustrator cc) and I've taken a couple of my illustrations and attempted to use the image trace. The only way I can seem to get the image trace to actually produce an accurate trace is if I use a very large file size. So I take my scanned image (600 dpi 2000x 1891) and load it into illustrator, and here's where the problem comes in. Illustrator will not show my entire image on the screen. I zoom out as far as I can go and it's still cutting off the bottom and top of the image. When I try to scale the image it won't let me scale it down to even 90%.
So my question, is there anyway I can load my full size image into illustrator, image trace it, and then scale it down so I can see the whole image on my screen? It's very hard to paint and work around the image when it's getting cut off.
The first picture is what the whole picture looks like, but it's such a small file size it's blurry and won't image trace correctly.
The 2nd image is what happens when I load my full image size in, I'm scrolled as high as the page will go and the top is still cut off.
i try and use live trace in simple trace it works but if i use any of the color options to trace my image just goes white cant see a thing ?? Ive tried several different jpegs a photoshop file etc etc tried placing, importing dragging image to illustrator with the same results call adobe they want 50 bucks.
I had a lot of good presets and actions that I've come to rely on. Now that I have Illustrator CC, I'm not using it :-( because I can't find where to migrate the presets from CS6 to CC.
One in particular that I need are my Image Trace presets... I have looked for them in the Presets folder, and even tried moving the "ImageTracing.jsx" script from CS6 to CC, but I don't understand how this is supposed to work.
Presets are so much easier to handle in Photoshop!
For my work I use the Image Trace a lot. When I Image Trace something and then expand it, it shifts the art over. Every once in a while I wouldn't mind but it does it every time and I have to go back and nudge it back into place by setting the original layer as a template and then looking at it in Outline mode. Here is an example of the shift...
I never had this issue in any other version of Illustrator and I have been working with it since 8. When I have multiple items to Image Trace on one of my jobs and I Image Trace on each one individually, it does it in random directions. Sometimes down and to the right, sometimes up and to the left and sometimes it doesn't do it at all.
Here are the settings I am using...
I am image tracing 1200ppi bitmaps and I don't need it to be any more exact than it is now becuase I am then offsetting it .05" and using that as a relief for our products. But ignoring the shift would make one of our CNC machines mill through the art. Anything to stop "THE SHIFT" would be great. I am using up precious time in my pre-production schedule to be constantly doing this.
I am new to Illustrator, but know that I need to select the object I'd like to trace before using Image Trace. The problem is every time I used the selection tool, the entire picture is selected, and then traced.
We have recently updated our office Adobe Creative Suite, and are now using Illustrator CS6 to clean-up hand drawn sketches. When we run any sort of trace on a simple, black and white line drawing, the trace results in a negative image: the white background turns black, and the outline of the sketch is white. We have tried checking the "ignore white" box and several other settings changes. Initially, for our first few times using the new suite this didn't happen:
I am trying to use Illustrator to create source files for a CNC cutting machine, it requires a single path or paths to be created and exported a as. DXF file.
The trouble I am having is that when I use image trace to create a path, I am getting multiple paths stacked. I have the image trace set to create fills.
All I do is place image, trace image with settings that give good results, expand trace, remove fill, apply stroke and save.
Is there a way to create one single path in illustrator, I am using the demo version with a view to buy but if this cannot be done then it's a non-starter.
I place the image in AI then hit the live trace button. The image changes into what appears to be vector, but remains a solid image. i.e. can not select any of the shapes or use magic wand tool?
I'm working on an assignment for my concept stratagies class were we have to design a logo for assigned company. My logo needs a brushed look to it that i could only recreate with image trace. Completely new to this technique and so is my professor. Here's the issue:
Scanned in my tight pencil logo design and saved as a jpeg since there was no other option
Opened in Illustrator and used image trace... default everything except the threshold is set to about 102 or so to get the brushy look... also it's black and white
Extracted the image which gave me the vector that i needed
Selected the whole image to change the color to red and it turned gray.... that's not what I wanted...
I need to be able to change the color of this vector by 9/18/13...
I have a fairly good quality image with black text on a white background and I'm trying to trace it using live trace. I want to be able to manipulate it like normal text would allow you to. The font is a serif font and contains some thinner lines, so whenever I live trace it, it comes up quite uneven and all over the place. I've tried tinkering with the settings but nothing I do really seems to make much difference. My question is, are there any specific settings or modes that are best suited for doing traces of text, or any other methods for that matter? I can't recreate the text using a pen tool - it would take way too long!
When using image trace in CS6, illustrator seems to be shifting the results. Is there anyway to prevent this. I have several images that I am tracing along with other vector elements that need to stay in alignment with each other.
The Blue is the location of the original image and the black is the tracing result. I'm seeing this shift in each of the view modes and regardless of which preset I use. I've also tried leaving the image linked and embedding the image with no difference.
In addition, I am having a hard time getting black and white images to trace to the same quality I had in CS4. As you can see I'm getting pinched sections on lines even with a Path setting of 97-100% and Noise of 1 px. I also tried a path setting of as low as 20%, the pinching of the lines was gone, but it was so over generalized that I lost a lot of the other character.
In CS4 I was able to use path fitting 2px Min area 10px corner angle 20 and get this much better result
the white hole is preserved, there is no pinching of the line. I keep reading how the new image trace is supposed to be so much better, but I can't seem to find any evidence of it in a simple a black and white image.
I've just used image trace to get a three colour vector of a photograph. I want to replace the three colours in the image with colours from my brand's style guide. At the moment, they're thre shades of a kind of muddy brown.
How I do this? The three colours in the image aren't showing in the swatch menu and I don't really know what I'm doing.
How do I use compound paths after image trace? Vector seems locked up after I create it. I have tried unlocking, ungrouping, etc. I want to knockout portions of the art. I only created part of the vector in image trace, and the knockouts are self-created.
