Vectorising in Illustrator CS 2

[Peter Normington]

will need your password to view the link!!!
Peter

[Mark S]

I’m Running CS2 and using “Live Trace”

To be honest i haven’t had that much experience with vectorising from images but i did try with a couple of logo’s.

Comparing the results with corel 11
and to be honest there isn’t a great deal of difference.

You have to tweak various settings manually to obtain the best result.

But the best result in my opinion is always too busy?
You end up having to remove extra anchor points etc..

Lets say the result isn’t great for a cutter as lines cross over etc..

My be just my inexperience of vectoring in any software.

My advice, if your paying + £100 for the upgrade forget it.

But i may learn some tips from other members and improve on
my limited experience.

Hope that help..

Mark.

[John Childs]

I have just upgraded to CS2 and haven’t used LiveTrace yet but I understand that it is just the functionality of Adobe Streamline bundled in with Illustrator.

If so, then I would suggest that you just need practice. No vectorising software is going to give exactly the result you want but with experience you can get very close so that manually adjusting is quick and easy.

Obviously the quality of the original artwork is of paramount importance but a common mistake is to scan at too high a resolution which will result in too many points. Always use the lowest resolution you can for the artwork you have. After that, play with the settings and after a while experience will tell you what you need to do in any given set of circumstances.

[Mark S]

Just something else to consider before an upgrade?

Your Cutter Drivers?

I’m using Illustrator CS2 and my Graphtec 5100 does not support CS2 just now 🙁

So Ive had to revert back to CS for now 🙁

[Mark S]

quote johnchilds:

a common mistake is to scan at too high a resolution which will result in too many points. Always use the lowest resolution you can for the artwork you have.

Never Thought of that, i always tried to push higher res images.

Will give it a go 🙂

[John Childs]

Mark…

I only found out about resolution by accident. I started out with one of the original Apple scanners which, in those distant days, was cutting edge technology at 150 dpi and worked well. Years later when I upgraded to a higher res Epson I started suffering the problems you describe. I was pretty miffed at having spent all that money for something which performed worse than it’s almost obsolete predecessor which, by that time, the Apple was and I just used my nice new 1200 dpi Epson at 150 or 300. Nowadays, when I need a new scanner, I just buy the cheapest I can find because they will do what I want just as well as something much more expensive.

We use Illom Cutline for cutting, which hasn’t been updated for a while, and won’t take CS2 files. Come to that it won’t even take Illustrator 10 files either. Consequently we save everything we do as Illustrator 8, open up in Cutline and go from there.

[John Childs]

There is an excellent “how-to” on using LiveTrace in an Illustrator Masterclass on page 72 of the 30th of September issue of MacUser. Vol 21 number 20.

If anybody wants to read it, and can’t obtain their own copy, I would be happy to photocopy mine and send it on.

[Mark S]

Just a side note.

Graphtec have just released the drivers supporting CS2

whoo hooo,

Saves me swapping files from CS2 to CS now 🙂

Hope that helps,
you can get them from graphtec website.

Mark

[Gordon Forbes]

I have been told by an aquaintence of mine who vectorises a lot of stuff staight from a scanner and he has got it down to a fine art in that he has virtually no tweaking to do once converted and what he uses is a GEL pen to draw with and it has to be black take it to photoshop make it black and white and uses adobe’s trace thingy. I haven’t tried it but he does draw a lot of stickers and converts them this way.

I was going to try it with photo paper and a GEL pen and see how it comes out that way.

Goop