Illustrator How-To: When Work Is Play

LiveTrace, which converts bitmaps to vector images, debuted in Illustrator CS2. Hands down, LiveTrace is my favorite new feature ever, in any software application. Not only is practical -- for example, it takes mere seconds to flawlessly draw that ancient logo your client has only on a piece of paper -- it's hecka fun, too. Learn all about tracing in this comprehensive article.
Written on October 21, 2005

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LiveTrace takes scanned line art and bitmapped images and converts them to scalable vector art. It's easy to use, but there are ways to fine-tune the process to get more accurate results. In this article, you'll read about customizing LiveTrace depending on the source image and the effect you want. You'll also learn about different ways to preview the image, batch-processing traces, and how you can use Photoshop in conjunction with LiveTrace.


Once you expand the Live Trace, you can edit each individual path as you would any vector object.

We've posted this excerpt as a PDF file. To open the PDF file in your Web browser, click "LiveTrace." You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.

To open the PDF, you'll need a full version of Adobe Acrobat (5 or higher) or the Adobe Reader, which you can download here:

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To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.

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Access

I, also could not access this article, as the browser came up as a blank page.

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Problems Downloading

You may have some browser plug-ins conflicting with the download. Trying right+clicking (control+clicking on Macintosh) on the PDF link in the story and then saving the PDF directly to your hard disk. Do this rather than clicking directly on the link and letting your browser figure things out.

Cindy @ creativepro.com

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Can't access this article

I'd love to read this article because this function was an exciting addition to CS, but never worked half as well as Streamline. Glad to hear they've beefed it up...but I can't seem to access this article. It just doens't come up when I click on the link to the pdf. I get a blank page.
jule.versteegh@musco.com

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