Illustrator error in Trace?

Question

I'm trying to vectorize an full color image that I made in Photoshop.  I've tried with the original image being 600, 300, and 75 resolution, but each time I try to Live Trace it, Illustrator takes a while, erases the artboard, then tells me that there has been an unknown error (also something about not enough memory, though I'm using a really good, new computer).  What am I doing wrong?  And how can I vectorize this image?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi, i know this is an old question, but maybe answering it still might be useful to someone.
I had this problem recently, Illustrator started reporting unknown error (CANT) when I tried to trace certain image; until then tracing worked perfectly fine.
I went to EDIT ---> Tracing Presets (I'm using CS4), and there you can see a list of all the tracing presets that Live Trace uses. You can click on the one you want to use for tracing your image and click Edit. It opens a window where you can see all the settings of the tracing preset and change them. You can also create a new preset.
Now, changing some of the settings might do the trick, depending on what your picture is like (hovering over each setting tells you what it does and what happens as a result of adjusting it defferently). Maybe it has more colors or tiny details than Live Trace can process; you might try enhancing the number of colors or adjusting the Minimum Area (the smallest feature -in pixels- that will be traced). I'm just guessing though because my picture was black and white, and the problem turned out to be that the preset I wanted to use (Lettering) was set by default to trace only fills. My picture had a lot of thin and delicate artwork that Live Trace couldn't create fills for; but when i enabled the option strokes, the tracing worked normally.