Line art will never be the same
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Table of Contents
By Matt Kloskowski for Layers Magazine
The quality of the new features in Adobe® Illustrator® CS2 is significant for just about any illustrator. Among them, the new Live Trace and Live Paint features are probably the most glamorous and useful. In this tutorial, we’re going to see a real-world example of how these features can be used to take an ordinary piece of line art and convert it to vector using Live Trace. Then we’ll use Live Paint to quickly and easily add color. Finally, you’ll learn a few tricks to help export this file to Photoshop for any detail painting.
Use Live Trace
For this tutorial, we’ve taken a drawing from Patrick Shettlesworth of www.polykarbon.com. He’s an incredible artist and produces some stunning anime imagery. This was given to us as a GIF image but it could just as easily have been a TIFF or PSD among others.
Right-click the image, choose Save As, and then save it to your computer.
1. Place line art in Illustrator
Create a new RGB document in Illustrator CS2. Choose File > Place and navigate to the file that contains the line art you’d like to trace in Illustrator. This file can be in many formats. Click the Place button to place this image into Illustrator.
2. Tracing options
Click on the small circle to the right of the layer’s name in the Layers palette to target the image.
The layers palette
You’ll see the Live Trace button appear in the Control Palette under the menu bar. You’ve got a few options at this point: You could just click the Live Trace button to use the default settings and see what happens, or you could click the down arrow next to the Live Trace button and pick one of the listed presets. You could also create your own custom settings in the Tracing Options dialog (Object > Live Trace > Tracing Options).
Click the Tracing Presets And Options button in the Control palette to select a tracing preset.
3. Click the Live Trace button
For the sake of this example, we’re just going to use the default settings. It actually does a great job on this line art drawing. To use the default settings, just click the Live Trace button. In a few seconds’ time, you’ll be left with a vector version of the line art. In fact, the process took less than 3 seconds to trace on my computer and the quality is excellent. Repeat after me please…“Wow!”
The line art is converted to vector when you click the Live Trace button.
4. Adjust Threshold for more detail
Adjust the settings in the Control Palette to fine-tune the traced outlines. Adjusting the Threshold or Min Area settings will produce some interesting results. You can also click the Trace Options Dialog icon next to the Preset drop-down list to adjust all of the settings. In this example, we were able to bring out a little more detail in the line art by reducing the Threshold setting to 90.
Adjust the Threshold and Min Area settings in the Control Palette.
