Cleaning "holes" out of Live Trace

I have done a live trace of a somewhat complex GIF that I want to simplify into black silhouette. What I have is a black object filled with dozens of irregularly shaped closed paths within it. I want to get rid of these, and was thinking I could just choose "ungroup," then select all closed paths except the large one enveloping them and delete them. I'm obviously misunderstanding something, though, since Illustrator sees what I have as one object already. The only way I'm able to remove all those little white shapes is to delete their anchor points one by one. There has to be a better way . . .
Many thanks to the smart people.
Rob

The expanded live trace is a group by default. Are you using Direct Select tool (hollow arrow)?
Also, did you choose "Ignore White Areas" in the trace options dialog? If so, some of the objects will be compound paths. The compound path can be "released" under Object menu. You could also run trace to include white. Then it might be easier to select them. If it is too complex, consider increasing "Minumum area" and/or blurring image in the Trace options.

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How do you exit Live Trace mode?

Hi all.
Can anyone tell me how to get out of Live Trace mode without having to do multiple un-dos? The Photoshop file I have imported is still showing one of the Live trace options and I can't get it to return to normal.
thanks!
B.

Thanks!!
B.

Filling "Ignore White" holes after Live Trace/Expand

I'm relatively new to Illustrator CS4's Live Trace feature but have been using it a lot lately. When I place a Photoshop image (shot on white background) using Live Trace with the "Ignore White" box selected, it does a nice job of knocking out the background. However, after I Expand the Trace to create a vector image, I am often left with see-through hot spots on the object itself. When I try to select a hot spot to fill it with white, I can't select it. Normally one would use the Group Selection tool to select a specific path but the "holes" can't be selected. The only thing I can think of is to place a white "patch" behind the the object. Any other simpler ideas out there? Thanks!

First - before you can edit any LiveTrace object, you must expand the artwork (Object>Expand or Expand Apearance).
The paths created in LiveTrace are compound paths. You'd have to release the compound paths (Object>Compound Path>Release). All paths will default to the fill color of the original. Select the paths you want to color and fill.
You could avoid this by not ignoring the white when you trace. After expanding, use the direct selection tool (open or white arrow) to select the white background and delete. If you need some of the remaining white areas transparent, you may now select these and their surrounding elements and create compound paths.
One other way, again after expansion of the artwork, would be to use the LivePaint tool. Select the artwork, choose the LivePaint tool, convert to LivePaint object (Object>LivePaint>Make), then fill as needed.

Cleaning up after doing a live trace

Hi all! I did a live trace and it did pretty well. The image I traced was fairly simple. But I ended up with a lot of extra pieces in what should be a solid color. I've tried Select > Object > Stray points, but that didn't work. I have large area that I want to be one solid piece. Within this area, there are lots of little "pieces" that are the same color... How do I merge them all into one piece? I tried "Unite" in the pathfinder, and that didn't work, either.
In case I'm not being clear, basically, I want to do what the "smooth" function does in Photoshop... but in Illustrator.
I'm using CS6 on a Mac. Thanks!
Julie

I also find that when tracing high-res scans of B&W art, AI leaves an unnecessary layer of white underneath the black (making the file twice the size it needs to be). You can direct-select-click a black edge, invert the selection (option or alt-drag) to get the corresponding white path underneath, then Select>Same>Fill Color, and delete.

How can I live trace a hand sketch line work and cut from background to apply to new coloured backgr

I placed a hand drawn scanned photo of artwork to illustrator cs4 in an attempt to trace the lines and remove from paper and add the line drawing to a brochure artwork. this to give illusion of an old artist's manuscript with drawings. first attempt with the psd file in trying to apply trace as a "hand drawn " method crashed illustrator. I tried again and used ink drawing which came out blotchy. Tried simple trace and got a warning that the file was too large. I'm thinking that the drawing itself is very soft and the paper around it is grainy and dim. I had tried to brighten and lighten in the scan mode.I did get it as far as a trace at one point and used outline stroke but then couln't fill in the lines or cut it out. I have taken it to photoshop and drew a pen selection around the soft lines and used a transparent background on it, hoping to stroke it in illustrator and drag it off over to the brochure template .But didn't try it yet. I also just made the resolution 250 and the size document to 6 x 9 in approx. But now am fearful of another experiemental attempt. Am I on the right track or is there another method to bringing in a line drawing that is not defined well and getting it to trace and remove from it's background to apply onto the illustrator document being worked on. I have done placing and tracing before but not a line work. Any suggestions that won't crash my program would be welcome. As an artist I will want to do this again and again so want to know the proper method or what I am missing. I've been using illustrator for 7 months now.

Maybe Li[ve trace] is not t]he way[ to go
I have some suggestion one leave it as is and use a blending mode of multiply to give it a color background like this
leave it as is make it a grayscale tiff import int Illustrator and color it it in Illustrator like this
Or trace over it with the brush tool aand then give it a color ground.
Or do the original over and do a cleaner job with no tone or a minimum of tone. Then Live trace.

I am using Illustrator CS5, how do I remove white outline after live trace?

I am working on a image that will be used as a sticker. I did all the painting in Photshop CS5. Now I want to create a cleaner image by making it a vector. My problem is when using Live Trace it comes out amazing. But this is in Illustrator. When i go and save it as a PDF or TIFF. It has a white line surrounding all the individual vectors.
how do i remove these?
I already did the Ignore White. I did not use the expand button, which is what the saved image looks like when i do press expand. Thats a No NO!
All my settings are at 300 res. I also rasterized the image too. it still came out the same way.
The image on the left i how it looks in illustrator. The left image is how it looks when it is opened as a jpeg or saved as a adobe PDF or Tiff.
Thank you,
Trojan

These could be
gaps due to differences in adjacent fill areas
antialaising issues across adjacent items
general trapping issues
I'm afraid you'll have to do some reading up on all of that and invest some time in manuall cleaning up your documents to fix these problems. Though I honestly don't see the relevance. Your image being quite detailed eitehr way it would be printed using inkjet or classical CMYK processes and beyond the die line for the cutout there would be no need to use any vector data.
Mylenium

Single ink line =single uniform traced line in Live Trace? Nope.

I'm using AI CS5 and I'm trying unsuccessfully to get a Technical Drawing result with ONE single traced uniform-thickness line from a single scanned drawn line in a Photoshop file. I am trying to NOT get a calligraphic line that runs thin-blob-thicker-blob-thin again, then becomes two parallel hairlines, then goes back to thick-thin. It may look hand-drawn and artsy; that's fine, but it isn't what I'm hoping for. I want a single standardized 1pt path with no double (supposedly outlined) sections. That's all I can get using the furshlugginer "Technical drawing" setting. Is that normal? If so, boy, have I got a feature request for Adobe! I realize that there will be occasional corners and feet that will become traced blobs that I will need to lop off, and I can handle that, but how do I draw a single line, scan it, then, in Live trace, achieve a single uniform line, like most of the actual, real, technical drawings I have seen? Or do I have a problematic copy of CS5?

Thanks, Steve. After my frustrtion and outrage subsided I checked out a dimly-related forum topic and found it very helpful: "uniform lines in a vector image". Your point was well made, plus two more: Set the Max line width wide enough so that no blob or corner exceeds it, e.g., 30pt is around a quarter of an inch; if I set the line width max at 30 pts I'm likely to wind up with a clean, uniform 30pt line without blobs, from which I can simply assign a thinner weight, such as 1 pt. The other tip is to blur the original raster line slightly, so as to suggest a centerline, blurred at its edges; Live Trace will zero in on the phony "centerline". Is there a "use centerline" setting in Live trace? I seem to remember that there was one in Autotrace and in Streamline, but I'm unable to find one in Live Trace. Frankly, the value of the "options" presented in the Live Trace pallet isn't particularly obvious. I looked through the Illustrator Classroom in a Book, and was told to "experiment with all the options", but not how to get any particular result. In the end, the settings can be used to get the results I was looking for, but I had to do some serious digging, without much help from the documentation. I would think that getting one traced vector line from one raster line would be a natural place to start. Guess not.

Removing gridpaper lines on scans with live trace?

Hi everyone
In my continuing struggle to get the 'perfect' scanned images vectorized I would like to solicit the advice of the forum again
i wish to remove/ignore in live trace the grid lines that are printed on certain notepad paper, but whilst retaining the inked/drawn images I have added myself.
Is there a plugin, recommended exterior app, or Illustrator process that can quickly do this?
Often these grid lines intersect the scanned image, which is the problem.
I use CS4..
Thank you!

I would use white-out (the white paint used to correct typing errors back in the typewriter days).
However, make sure you apply it to the grid lines on the graph paper and not the image on your monitor. Some white-out paints are oil-based and will wreak havoc on the protective surface coating found on most LCD monitors.
OK... seriously... I would clean up the scan in Photoshop before bringing it into Illustrator. (Select | Color Range will make quick work of it... unless you were boneheaded enough to sketch in the same color as the grid lines.)

Can Live Trace be added back for complex B&W illustration vectorizing?

Image Trace might work great for vectorizing color photos, but it is terrible at vectorizing complex B&W illustrations. Live Trace in CS2-CS5 was great at this. It's crazy that a new feature would break a previous functionality.
This is a pen & ink style illustration I was going to vectorize so that it would be easier to set up for a t-shirt:
As you can see from this comparison image, Live Trace does a much better job at converting this illustration to vector. It's very close to the original and has a very clean appearance. After trying every setting possible, this is the best result I could manage in Image Trace:
It seems like Image Trace can't handle the complexity that Live Trace used to work so well with. I noticed if I cropped out just the chicken, Image Trace did a better job with just that part of it. Live Trace could handle the entire thing, though, and cropping an image in to sections just adds more steps and more work.
Whatever engine Live Trace used to have, please please please add it back in for B&W art vectorizing. Right now I have to keep my old copy of CS4 installed just so I can use Live Trace. It seems like this is a problem that people have been mentioning: http://forums.adobe.com/message/5908553

Thanks for taking the time to comment, rcraighead.
Your version does look better, I agree, but the higher threshold is filling in a lot of details with black (like the eyes). The feathered lines are also rounding off at the ends, which happens in Image Trace, but never was a problem in Live Trace. It kind of gives it a "stamped" feel, like the ink is bleeding over.
The original image is about 8.5 x 11, 300 ppi. I guess I'll just have to keep CS4 installed to use Live Trace. I tweeted at Adobe Illustrator with my issue and they told me to post here

Stroking and filling doesn't work in paths expanded from Live Trace

I’m using Adobe Illustrator CS4. I’m a complete beginner, though I’ve done a bit of reading about the basics.
After tracing a bitmap image (of black letters on a transparent background, in pdf format) using Live Trace, expanding it, and editing the paths with the pen tool to my satisfaction, I find neither fills nor strokes appear -- I can change the fill settings or stroke settings, but the paths just stay the colour of all unfilled paths on that layer. (I’m viewing the document in preview mode.) Also, when selecting paths with either the Selection tool or the Direct Selection tool and then trying to use Live Paint, I get a notification that "the selection contains objects that cannot be converted. Live Paint groups can only contain paths and compound paths. Clipping paths are not allowed." When I go to the Object Menu, under Clipping Mask the only available option is "Make Mask", and "Release" and "Edit Mask" are greyed out, which suggests to me there are no clipping masks present.
I’ve created a separate, nearly identical document where strokes, fills and Live Paint work fine. The only difference is that when I used Live Trace on the bitmap image, for the non-working document I selected "Outlines" for the Vector section of the View options (in the Tracing Options dialogue box), and in the working one I selected "Tracing Result" instead. For both, I used the same original document settings, placed the same bitmap image, used the Live Trace preset "Black and White Logo" with all the default settings except that I checked the "Ignore White" box, and then clicked Expand.
Obviously, I know what I did wrong, though I don’t know why it made a difference. But since I spent many hours editing the paths in the screwed-up document before I realized stroking and filling wouldn’t show up, is there a way to fix it? How can I make the paths "valid" for stroking, filling, and Live Paint -- or, failing that, is there a way to somehow copy or automatically trace the shape of the paths, so I don’t have to do all that editing again?
This is kind of urgent, since I’m creating a logo for a project that needs to be finished soon. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I could send someone the document by e-mail if you wanted to look at it properly -- since I’m a beginner, I don’t know what I need to describe.

Never mind! I fixed it. For anyone else who has this same problem -- apparently, I’d made it so the paths were actually guides, which can look like and possess the properties of paths but which don’t show when you print. After going to View, Guides, Release Guides, the fills and strokes manifested, and the paths became "valid".

How can I select and delete the fill color (white background) of a live trace (B&W) with in an actio

How can I select and delete the fill color (white background) of a live trace (B&W) with in an action set?
Illustrator CS4 in windows XP.

Maybe Li[ve trace] is not t]he way[ to go
I have some suggestion one leave it as is and use a blending mode of multiply to give it a color background like this
leave it as is make it a grayscale tiff import int Illustrator and color it it in Illustrator like this
Or trace over it with the brush tool aand then give it a color ground.
Or do the original over and do a cleaner job with no tone or a minimum of tone. Then Live trace.

How to display Live Trace settings in CS3?

I'm on CS3 - I remember before having a horizontal bar across the top showing the tool properties, but I can't figure out how to show that. Particularly for Live Trace - I want to have access to the different tool options - how do I show this at the top or change the settings?

Ah yes! thank you

Working with overlapping paths created by Live Trace

Hi I am working with a live trace that has been expanded to create many paths. Some of them are compound paths, and the inner path of the compound path fits right on top of another path of the same dimensions and positioning, like a donut hole, and that inner path is filled with a different color. I want to manipulate the donut hole at the same time as the inner path of the compound path without having to select each path separately (and without having to think about making sure the path on top is is completely contained by the path underneath). Is there an easy way to select the corresponding components (anchor, segment, or even control handle) of both paths simultaneously, or at least quickly, without having to scroll through the layers panel to locate them? There are hundreds of paths so that is not practical..
For now I am selecting whatever is on top, moving it, then selecting the path that occupied the same space underneath the moved path before it was moved... it would be really cool if more than one object could be selected at the same time, or if there is some better way to do this..
Specifically, I have a 6 color leaf traced, but but since it wasn't complete due to some obstruction in the original photo, I am trying to recreate the obstructed portion. Since there are a few colors, Live Trace created several shapes (I have done what I could to minimize the number of anchors and paths using the trace options). I think at the moment that I am just stuck with some tedious work, but am asking just in case there is something I've missed TIA!

If the different-colored adjacent paths do, in fact, have perfectly aligned anchorPoints and handles you can:
1. Move an anchor of one path.
2. Select the corresponding anchor of the other path
3. Ctrl-D (Transform Again)
Or, you can use the Lasso to select the coincident anchors of both paths and move them at once.
Either way, you are probably in for some tedious work.
Since there are only six colors at work anyway, depending on the nature of the artwork, you could perhaps convert the results to a LivePaint group. Then, (again, depending on the specific artwork), when you move an anchorPoint on an edge between two adjacent different-colored regions, the fills on both sides of the altered edge update accordingly:
See online help about LiveTrace and LivePaint features.
JET

Live trace, gradients and compounding paths

I have a complex shape, and I want to have a copy behind of it that is filled.. the shape itself is a combination of stokes and fills, so a straight-out fill doesn't look good at all.. I can get it all colored the same way using live paint groups to only fill in the areas that are completely surrounded. The problem with that, though, is a gradient will apply separately to each object, but if I make a compound path it fills in some bits of the strokes the protrude as lines into the outside (it's a ironwork sort of pattern).
The only way i can think to do this automatically would be to color all the selections the same and then rasterize it and then live trace it so it's one object and then apply the gradient to that, but I feel there's probably a more straightforward way. Not sure I explained that properly, if something's unclear I'll be happy to elaborate

"The problem with that, though, is a gradient will apply separately to each object..."
Once you get to this point, you can grab the gradient tool from the tool panel and drag across all of the filled shapes. This will make one uniform gradient seen through the many pieces of the selection.
Give that a try, let us know how it goes.

Problems with black fills in live trace(d) eps images in Word and certain printers

Hi folks, PLEASE help me with this if you know a possible solution. I regularly run Live Trace in Illustrator CS3 on my grayscale bmp or tiff scanned images, save them as an eps, then folks in other departments insert them into Microsoft Word pages. Sometimes these images display in Word with unintended black fills, and some printers print them out with the same corrupted appearance, yet some other printers print them fine (even if the display in Word shows them with the unintended black fills). I THINK this might be a postscript issue (?). I don't have the option of telling everyone to change from Word to InDesign (which would absolutely solve the problem immediately). Is there something I can set while performing Live Trace? They really need the eps files, so I don't have the option of saving them as another format. HELP! Thanks...

I use Mac at home and love it. At work, we use PC platform. I can't save as a pdf because they need to stay vector graphics. he departments want us to save the eps in version 8 because they're STILL using Windows 2003 (ugh). I keep thinking there must be something I can do while in Live Trace because we've never noticed any inintended black fills in graphics not created using Live Trace. Somehow, Word and some printers are not interpreting some postscript language correctly. InDesign has zero issues with it. Some printers have no problem with it, so I assume they are postscript printers. There's got to be a way I can still save as an eps but without the postscript conflict (IF that's what it is).

Cleaning "holes" out of Live Trace

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