Live Trace: center line instead of outline?

In Streamline, in the conversion setup, I had the option of "center line" or "outline". Is there anyway to get "center line" in Live Trace or in another function. I am converting TIFF images to DXF for line drawing engravings in stone.
Thank you in advance.
Diane

Wade? Diane is talking about Live Trace. Did you mean she could alter the location of the stroke AFTER the trace?
Diane, I don't think this is precisely what you want. But depending on the nature of the source TIF, you might try selecting the stroke option and deselecting the fill option on the right side of the Live Trace dialog. Turn on Preview and then adjust: (1) the stroke weight setting; (2) the amount of blur applied to the source image (left side of dialog).
Sometimes this gets me a satisfactory line drawing, sometimes not. Again, depends on nature of the source image.

Similar Messages

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.

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.

Remove path white lines after Live Trace

Hello,
Very new to Adobe products(CS5).....
I have created a glass orb image (no mean feat for me!!) in PS from which I would like to make a .swf file from. The plan is to convert it to an ai in Illustrator and then export to .swf.
I have opened the .psd file in illustrator and used live trace to convert to a vector. However, when I expand the resultant image is left with numerous white pathway lines that I suppose were generated by the trace. How can I remove these lines?
Any help greatly received, remembering that I am a real novice to this.
Regards,
Iain....

Thanks Scott,
I have the "Ignore White" option ticked.
I've actually found the solution. When exporting to .swf I selected "AI layers to SWF Symbols" instead of "AI file to SWF symbols". I have no idea why this sorts it though??
Thanks again for your reply.

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

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 you add fill color to outlines that are fills too? (colorizing a drawing after Live Trace)

I have a cartoon drawing that I plan to scan in and run Live Trace on to get into Illustrator. To add color to all the white areas,, generally I would create a fill the shape of the area behind the traced area and color it. With this one, I have a LOT more areas than I am use to. Is there a way to just select one of these areas and tell it to put a color in instead of creating a shape of that area in each spot? I know this sounds confusing!

Convert the Live-Traced object to a Live Paint object and fill distinct areas with the Paint Bucket tool. Check help files for more info.

Convert Type to Centerline Instead of Outline

Is there any way to convert type so that Illustrator created a centerline instead of an outline?

There is no
good automatic way. It's easy to see why:
1. Set several lines of text, using various fonts.
2. Type: Convert to Paths.
3. White Pointer: Marquee select around all the former text so you can see all the anchorPoints.
Now look at any particular character, especially one with a counter (a hole in it) like A, B, b, etc. Imagine yourself the programmer and try to come up with a scheme that would intelligently take the anchorPoints that you see and interpolate them into a path that the user would consider a "centerline." Bear in mind, the scheme has to work for a "B" that is set in a blocky sans serif, as well as a "B" that is set in a swirly script.
So such a thing would no doubt resort to some kind of auto-trace routine that traces "centerlines." It would probably also need some kind of shape-recognition routine built in so that when the trace reached, for example, the join between the leg and the bowl of a "b" it would know where and how to make the "fork in the road."
For a starting point in trying to do it with Live Trace in CS3:
1. Select the text. Object>Rasterize. Choose Bitmap for color mode.
2. Object>LiveTrace>LiveTraceOptions. In the dialog, turn on the Preview checkbox. Set Mode to Black and White. Turn off the Fills checkbox. Turn on the Ignore White checkbox. Set Maximum Stroke Weight all the way to 100px. Set PathFitting all the way to 10. Play with the other sliders and preview the results.
Frankly, though, I've never seen an autotrace program really yield the kind of clean results most people would have in mind as "glyph centerlines."
For some tips on doing it manually, see
this PDF.
JET

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".

Convert live trace object to gradient mesh? Help please! :)

Does anyone have advice on turning a live trace object into a gradient mesh? Or some sort of workaround? We love the live trace tool, but cannot get the mesh to apply to it unless created by the pen tool first. Thanks for any help, using CS5.

Yes Monika has this right.
Ths is wha will happen toyour rt if you are first sucessful in creating shapes and then if you are successful in converting to gradient mesh.
You willlose your strokes and some of your strkes will be in part filed objects.
Best to do the live trace for the ink work and the gradient mesh as separate shaphes, but I do not think it is ncessary to lose you strokes by using tham ads clipping paths I think simply placing the gradient mesh objects behind the line work will do the trick.
Sort of like this

Map Builder - Fenced Center Line

Hi everyone
In order to depict depressed contours using Map Builder (ver 11.1.1.0.0), I would like to use a fenced center line with a pattern similar to this: ___|___|___|___|___ . However, Map Builder seems not to be able to create a fenced line with vertical lines above the horizontal line.
Any help would be highly appreciated.
Regards,
Panagiotis

Fenced lines cross the base lines. What you can try to do is assign a marker pattern to your line style, instead of assigning a fenced line. With the marker pattern you can define the space between each markers. The following is a line style definition that has a marker pattern defined.
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<svg width="1in" height="1in">
<desc/>
<g class="line" style="fill:#FF3300;stroke-width:1">
    <line class="base"/>
    <marker-pattern offset="0" interval="5">
        <marker>M.PIN</marker>
</marker-pattern>
</g>
</svg>Joao

Can I import settings from CS5's Live Trace to CS6's Image Trace?

I'm loving CS6 Illustrator, except for one thing. Image Trace. Here, Adobe seem to have taken away the two most usefull settings from Live Trace, and replaced all the presets with ones that are pretty much unusable. I almost always used either 'Comic Art' or 'Lettering' to trace hand-drawn images, but they're both gone. None of the new settings are good enough, even if I make a custom one. The main issue is that the sliders in Image Trace are for completely different things to those in Live Trace, so it's difficult to translate one set of settings into the other.
With Image Trace, I cannot get the same results as with Live Trace, and so far, have found myself having to have Illustrator CS5 open at the same time as CS6, just so I can get workable traces.
I don't know if it's possible, but is there any way to import the presets from Live Trace, or even the full tool, into CS6, to replace the new Image Trace presets?
If not, does anyone know how to make the equivelant of Comic Art in Image Trace's new settings?
Images, to help define the problem: This is a close up of a file I was trying to trace, showing the major difference in quality between the two CS versions.
Left: CS5 - Comic Art setting.
Right: CS6 - This is a custom setting, but is the closest I have come to Comic Art thus far.
As you can see, the definition of Image Trace is far lower in quality than Live Trace, giving me one large connected blob of colour rather than the distictly separate lines produced in Live Trace.

I can't show the original as it is a HUGE file, 10000 pixels wide. I scan as high as my scanner will go. And that 10000 is shrunk down already so as not to exhaust my RAM. Below is a smaller version, but yes it is a b/w drawing but on a colour scan. It's been treated using Levels in Photoshop to remove the grey/blue colour of the paper, but nothing else.
I can see round the edges of the black in Photoshop that there are bits of colour, mainly reds/yellows. What do you think I need to do to it to help it trace better?
Actually, I'll throw in my Image Trace settings too, so people can see what settings I'm currenty trying... I got the Threshold directly from Comic Art in CS5.5.

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.

How can I simplify very complex illustrator file, multiple embedded live traces

Hello!
If anyone has any advice on this I'd be very grateful! I have created a piece of artwork in illustrator which is to be printed 4x3m for a wall mural. Therefore the file I am working with must either be a vecor or a large enough raster to be printed at such as size. I have set it up at 1 to 10 so its currently A3ish size. Each component of the collage is a separate ai file and contains many points as they are all live traces. It was no problem linking in all these initially but I now need to embed them so as I can give the printers a complete file. I have succeeded embedding every image apart from one last complex one which is crashing the whole thing. Are there any settings I may be able to change to reduce the file size or simplify the graphic (whilst remaining vectors.) Below is the file with the linked images and also the outline of the embedded version so far. The problem I am having is basically because of the final output size required.
The only thing I can think of doing is opening each separate component and saving as a raster then relinking these - but will this be even more problematic for illustrator that thousands of vector points? I can do it in photoshop if needs be but as the final image is to be printed 4x3m will this be too large to handle? The ai file with all images linked was 25MB but now 500MB with the sky still to embed.
Thank you!

Rosie,
4x3m is quite large, and the comfortable/relevant viewing distance is so much larger than the one you use to read this that you should be bold here, bolder than just saying 150DPI which may be used at normal reading distance depending on printing method.
You may (literally) see it this way: the viewing angle is important: when you look at a larger image, you move back until you have a comfortable viewing angle, and at the same viewing angle, the viewing distance is proportional to the size. This means that you can determine how the actual final size in pixel x pixel looks under a certain viewing angle at normal reading distance.

Live trace for more than 10 images at a time please

I need help with an effect I would like to do by applying live trace to a folder of images that later will be asembled as a movie in after effects. I'm not a good scriptor and the only way I have been able to get this to work is in bridge using the live type export. This works excellent only I am limited to 10 images at a time which is not good when there are 30 images in 1 second of video. If I want to apply this effect to hundreds of illustrator files is there a better way.
Please script experts in adobe land help me. The pay off will be really nice if only I can get it to work. Thanks. -tyler

Hi Tyler,
Open the script file and near the top (about line #34 change the "10" to what ever number you would like. You may want to keep a back up copy in a safe location prior to making modifications and depending on the number or files you set the new value to you may notice long periods of time that it seems as if the Bridge has hung or stopped responding.
Cheers,
oneale

Live Trace: center line instead of outline?

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