Expert: Amy - 2/5/2009

Question
I Have a file of Photoshop where the lines are all dented. I want to transform
that in Illustrator to perfectly curved lines (without the dentures from
Photoshop).
What are the steps to do that. I've never used Illustrator before so please
dummy instructions...
Thanks!
Karin.

Answer
Hi Karin,

First of all, you'll be saving that rater file in a format that your version of Illustrator can use (jpeg, psd, tif), at the highest resolution you can. 300 is great for most artwork. For black and white line art, you'll want it in the 800-1200dpi range. Make sure it's big enough, crisp enough, and clean enough that you can see the details in the image, but don't enlarge it/distort it/resample it just to gain size. You'll lose detail.

Then you can place the file or even copy and paste it into a new, blank Illustrator document. The larger the file is to begin with, the better your result will be. Do NOT place it/paste it and then enlarge it.

From there, you are going to need to learn how to use Live Trace. Live Trace is found under the Object menu.

Live Trace has too many details to discuss in this answer, and many people have already created very nice tutorials on its use, so I suggest you look for a tutorial video on the web to show you how to use Live Trace. There even are some on YouTube. Just google "Live Trace video tutorial" and you get quite a few.

Or if you prefer to read about it, try a page like this:
http://www.layersmagazine.com/illustrator-tracing.html

Live Trace is actually a very simple process but there are a lot of options to set that affect the final quality of your traced image. Settings are highly dependent on what your raster image looks like to begin with. That article actually describes them pretty well.

Good luck!
Amy