Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 6/8/2011

Question
Hi,
I am trying to get an object out of a scanned JPG document and into Illustrator. I have drawn these objects on millimeter paper and need to get rid of the grid background. And I need to digitize the drawings. I am stuck, and admittedly not very good at dealing with this kind of stuff. In the end, I need to be able to drop my drawing with no background (or white background) into a word document along with other drawings on the same page. Can you help? Thanks!

Answer
Hi Betsy,

You can scan these images in and place them into Illustrator using File>Place. Then while you have them selected, you can click the Live Trace button in the options bar at the top of the window (CS3 and higher). You can then use the presets and adjust the settings to create a vector file of this image.

Here is a step by step video of how this works:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/creative-suite-podcast-designers/trace-paint-and-color...

Thanks

Kevin