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This is Matthew from Advantage Technical Services with another quick tip.
In Adobe Illustrator, we're going to look at how to create a photo trace to create a
vector object around a photographic image. We have a JPG object that we've already placed
into our layer, and all I'm going to do first is to duplicate that layer.
Simply click and drag it over the add new layer, and it will make a second copy.
This is where we're going to be doing all of our work, so go ahead and hide the first
layer. I'm just going to rename this, "Trace."
Now, what we're going to use is our Live Trace feature, in our Object, Live Trace, and we're
going to go in our tracing objects for a minute. Depending on the resolution, you could get
a message saying to proceed slowly. Typically, what I do, is do a color trace
to get as much information as I can, and for this it's mostly greyscale, so I'm just going
to use a few colors. We're going to go ahead and let it trace.
Now, you can see we have a traced outline. It doesn't look perfect, but we're going to
fix that later on. Go to our expand tool, and that will give
us our vector traced objects. Now, what we've got is a white border here
that we need to get rid of, so the first thing we're going to do is ungroup everything.
Grab just that outlined shape and delete it out.
If we select everything, we can see we've got all of our objects there.
Now just like before with our vector trace, we're just going to use our pathfinder tool,
and add that all to one shape area. You'll notice that we now have one object
with a bunch of objects inside of it. We can ungroup all of that, grab it again,
use a compound path, and now we have just our outside shape.
We can select the inverse to get all the small pieces out, and delete those out.
Now, we've got a little issue up here where it has an open space right there.
We're going to fix this an easy way. You could come in and use your object point-to-point
selection tools and clean that up, but we're just going to do it the simple way by expanding
this out by just using our object path, offset path.
We're going to do this about .05 inch. We'll make a small shape, select everything
again, run our pathfinder, and now we've got one nice outlined shape that encompasses our
entire graphic. Now, if we turn that layer back on, and turn
our trace from a fill to a stoke, you can see it's just a hair on the outside of our
object. Now, some minor defects, like this jagged
edge here or this point here, we can clean up using our point selection tools.
Simply just bring that back up. Now that we have our outlined shape, we can
just print and cut from that, or use this as a dyeline.
We can also just simplify the path by cleaning up the excess points here and making them
more clean cut. That will take less time to cut.
This is Matthew with Advantage Technical Services, and I hope it's been helpful.