Many designers, including myself, create logos using this method. Trace the outline, edit the vector, and add a personal touch to make their work unique.
Tutorial: Trace Photos
This tutorial describes how to use Vector Magic Desktop Edition to produce interesting visual effects with photographs. This process is typically called vectorization or tracing. Photo vectorization is often done by hand, but this tutorial explains how you can use Vector Magic to make that process fast and easy for certain types of photographs.
This tutorial does apply to:
- Photographs, especially those with high contrast, such as silhouettes
It does not apply to:
- Scans of artwork that was originally drawn or printed on paper. See separate tutorial
- Bitmaps that were digitally rasterized from a vector art original. See separate tutorial
- Images drawn in a bitmap editing tool like Photoshop.
What do I need to follow this tutorial?
- This tutorial uses Vector Magic Desktop Edition. You can download a trial version from the desktop application page.
- The Online Edition is very similar to the Fully Automatic mode in the Desktop Edition. The user interface looks slightly different, and there’s no transparency support. With those caveats in mind, you can also use the Online Edition to follow this tutorial.
In Vector Magic, we distinguish between vectorizing logos (a word we use to mean any sort of flat-shaded illustration that has been or should be vector art), and vectorizing photographs.
With logos, there is usually a correct vectorization. Typically, someone drew the logo in a vector editor originally, and the goal of vectorization is to recover that lost original. We call this “reconstructive” vectorization because the goal is to reconstruct the original vector art.
With photos, the situation is not so simple. There is no single correct answer when vectorizing a photo. What result should be given depends on what the user is looking for. We call this “inspirational” vectorization because the photograph serves as inspiration for the vector art.
Vectorizing high-contrast photos
Of the various types of photograph vectorization, the one I find the most compelling is the vectorization of high-contrast scenes, especially those containing silhouettes. This section will describe some tricks for getting good results when doing this type of vectorization.
Gulls in silhouette
Consider the following source image(shown at reduced size, full size image available here):
A neat trick is to use the “Logo with Blended Edges” mode rather than the photo mode. The photo mode uses as many colors as the algorithm deems necessary to achieve a certain approximate error. The logo mode lets you pick the number of colors to use. It can produce a neat effect to select a small number of colors in an image like this one.
Try the settings:
- Basic Wizard
- Logo with Blended Edges (anti-aliased)
- Low Quality
- Fixed Colors (3 colors)
This results in the following vectorized result (available in SVG format here):
This result is in stark contrast to the result from the photo mode (download the SVG here):
Sandhill Cranes in flight
Another interesting photo of birds in silhouette is this one of some Sandhill cranes in flight (full sized version available here):
Again, by restricting the palette, we can achieve an interesting visual result. Here, the settings are Logo with Blended Edges, Medium, 5 Fixed Colors. The SVG can be downloaded here and a preview is shown below:
This can be compared to the result when using the photo mode (SVG available here):
One interesting thing you can do with a vectorized photo is to extract only a part of the photo for inclusion in a different composition. For example, the image below shows the cranes over a plain white background. They would make a nice little graphic for a newsletter for an organization with Sandhill or Crane in the title.
Method 1: Image Trace
I’m going to use this image to show you how to trace an image using Image Trace. It only takes two steps if you’re happy with the preset tracing effect! You can use the Image Trace feature to trace a photo image or logo.
Step 1: Open your image in Adobe Illustrator. When you click the image to select it, you’ll see the Image Trace option on the Quick Actions panel under Properties.
Step 2: Click Image Trace and you’ll see the tracing options.
Here’s an overview of the Image Trace preset options and you can see what effect each option applies. Choose the effect that you like.
As you can see, High Fidelity Photo will vectorize the image and it almost looks like the original photo. Low Fidelity Photo is still pretty realistic and makes the photo look like a painting. From 3 Colors to 16 Colors, the more colors you choose, the more details it shows.
Shades of Gray turns the image into a grayscale. The rest of the options turn the image into black and white in different ways. For example, If you’re tracing a logo, usually you would choose black and white as the color mode.
Personally, I barely used the Line Art or Technical Drawing options because it’s hard to get the right point.
Besides these preset options, you can also customize the tracing effect by changing the settings on the Image Trace panel. You can open the panel from the overhead menu Window > Image Trace.
For example, if you want to get a tracing effect between 6 Colors and 16 Colors, you can move the color slider to the right to increase the amount of color up to 30.
This is what it looks like with 10 Colors.
Let’s see another example of adjusting the Black and White Logo result. If you want to show more dark areas, increase the Threshold.
The preset threshold of the Black and White Logo tracing result is 128. You can see that the image doesn’t have too many details. I moved the slider to the right and this is what it looks like when the threshold is 180.
Now if you want to edit the image, you can Expand and Ungroup it to make changes.
When you click Expand, you’ll see the outline of the tracing result.
After you ungroup the image, you can select individual paths and make changes.
Too much detail? Only want to trace the outline of an image but the Line Art option doesn’t work? Check out method 2.
Method 2: Tracing Outline of an Image
You can use the pen tool, pencil, brushes, or any shape tools to trace the outline of an image. For example, this Flamingo image is already a simple graphic, we can trace it to simplify it even more.
Step 1: Place and embed the image in Adobe Illustrator.
Step 2: Lower the opacity to around 60% and lock the image. This step is make your tracing process easier. Lowering the opacity helps you see the tracing path, and locking the image avoids moving the image by accident while tracing.
Step 3 (Optional): Create a new layer for tracing. I do recommend tracing on a new layer because if you need to edit the tracing outlines altogether, the changes wouldn’t affect the image layer.
Step 4: Use the Pen Tool (keyboard shortcut P ) to trace the outline. If you want to add colors to the path, you should close the path by connecting the first and last anchor points of a path.
Step 5: Use the shape tool, pencil tool, or paintbrush to work on some details of the outline. For example, the eyes can be traced using the Ellipse Tool to draw circles, and for the body part, we can use a paintbrush to add details.
Delete the background layer and fix the details if needed. You can edit the traced image and make it your own style.
FAQs
Here are a couple more questions related to image tracing in Adobe Illustrator.
How to trace an image without the white background in Illustrator?
When you trace an image from Quick Actions, it comes with a white background, which you can normally expand the image, ungroup, select and delete the white background. Or you can get rid of the white background from the Image Trace panel by clicking Ignore White from the Advanced settings.
How do I turn an image into line art in Illustrator?
You can convert a photo into a line drawing using Image Trace, but the result might not be 100% satisfying. Depending on the style of line art, you can use Image Trace to get the basic outline, and then use other drawing tools to touch up the details.
How do I turn a drawing into a vector in Illustrator?
You can take a picture or scan your hand drawing and open it in Adobe Illustrator. Use the Pen Tool or other drawing tools to trace the outline and then color the drawing if needed.
