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Live Trace in Illustrator CS2: Turning a Bitmap Image into Vector Paths
Using live trace in Illustrator CS2, you can quickly convert a bitmap, jpg, gif, png, tif or psd image into a vector paths. Live trace is helpful when converting an image, such as a scanned sketch or photograph, into vector paths.
(We will be using both Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 for this tutorial but primarily Illustrator CS2.)
Step 1: Find an image that is preferably large (about 1500 pixels wide), with a high resolution (about 300 dpi or more) and as non-blurry as possible. I used a stock photo of a black bear (photo #835846) from stock.xchng.com.
Step 2: I don’t want any background in my vector image so I am going to remove the background but if you want to keep your background, skip this step. In Photoshop, open up the image and erase the background. We need to bring this image into Illustrator so you can save a JPG file of this image and a Photoshop file (if you wish to keep the editable/transparent layers).
Step 3: In Illustrator CS2, place the JPG image using the File > Place command. With the image still selected, go to Object > Live Trace > Tracing Options. You can use the settings as shown below or you can play around with the settings until you achieve the effect you want. In the “Preset” drop-down menu, you can choose default options, or you can adjust the settings yourself to have the vector in black, grayscale, colour, etc., and you can also use the preview option to view each change you make to the settings. Note: If you use your mouse to hover over each setting, an explanation appears for that setting. Click on “Trace” when you are finished.
Step 4: At this point the image looks different but it is not a vector yet. With the image still selected, go to Object > Live Trace > Expand. Now the image is converted to vector paths.
Step 5: Now you can change the colours of the vector. In step 3, I chose only 3 colours and grayscale and therefore I can select each of the three colours and group all the small pieces of each particular colour and then change the colour all at once instead of individually selecting all the tiny colour pieces which would take a long time. Here’s how you do this:
- with the Direct Selection Tool
 , select an area of colour, then go to Select > Same > Fill & Stroke
- to group that selection go to Object > Group (Win: Ctrl + G; Mac: Cmd + G)
- now select a colour to fill those shapes
- repeat for other 2 colours
Step 6: Remove white background. If you place this image over a colour background, you may notice there is a white background with the vector image. This is because the image we vectorized was a JPG which is not transparent so it brings in a white background with it. Use the Direct Selection Tool  , to select the white area(s) and then just hit “delete”.
I added a few more elements to create a logo and an advertisement design as shown below.
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