Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Tracing Full-Color Artwork

Live Tracing in Illustrator is not limited to black-and-white images,

either in terms of what you trace or what you create. Starting with a

full-color raster image, you can either trace a black-and-white version

or create color-fi lled paths. When I say “full color,” I don’t mean the

16 some-odd million colors that are digitally possible with an 8-bit

per channel image. That would make more paths than you (or even

I) could ever want to deal with, and you might as well leave such

a fi le to Photoshop in the fi rst place. But the fact is that in Illustra-

tor, you can distill the colors down to something reasonable while

maintaining the relative complexity of the original. And you can

save your working color palette for later use, including the ability

to adjust, edit, and swap those colors as you see fi t.

To trace the scanned full-color drawing in this exercise, we’ll be

working through virtually the same process we did in the last exer-

cise. But when we get to the Tracing Options dialog box, there are

some new considerations to make. And then I’ll show you how to

save (and alter) colors from the original artwork in order to make

color edits to the fi nal results.

Figure 11-23 .

1.

Open a fi le. Start by opening the fi le called

B&W Astronaut.ai from the Lesson 11

folder inside Lesson Files-AIcs5 1on1.

image, shown in Figure 11-23, is based on a scan of

an image ...