Smoothing in Illustrator

I did a live trace on this and its too ragged for what I intend on using it for. Whats the best way to smooth the edges? I don't want to do it by hand unless I have to, its a big file. Any help/tips/tricks etc?
Thanks!
M

I don't know about all of this i think you can do a good job with live trace.
There are two settings that might help in live trace try as black and white with a blur of say 6 px and a resampling of 275 px
then use the Object>Path>Simplify command to clean it up a bit.
Here what do you think
This is the live trace
this is the simplified path
Not so sure you will get better results by hand tracing either all kind of subjective.

Similar Messages

  • Smoothing not working

    Hi, In flash and illustrator my paint strokes are smoothed out very noticeably which I really like. In photoshop  with smoothing on I cannot notice any difference at all, the lines look jagged I tried on and off next two lines next to each other and they both look the same.  Doe smoothing work differently  in photoshop?  I trashed prefs but that made no diff.  
    I have 16GB i7 Macbook pro and latest photoshop.

    The brush smoothing function in Photoshop is extremely subtle compared to the smoothing in Illustrator or Flash.  Aside from its apparent magnitude, I believe it is fundamentally different.  In Illustrator the smoothing is applied to the path, which then gets stroked.  In Photoshop the smoothing appears to be applied to pixels as in a filter operation (say median, gaussian blur, or box , as examples). This is even true if you have a path in Photoshop which you stroke with a brush having its smoothing checked ON.
    asukulu wrote:
    I cannot use photoshop for illustrating  if I cannot paint smooth lines.     They look jagged and hand drawn which doesnt look good at all. 
    There are many who use Photoshop for illustrating, but  Illustrator in most cases is best for that activity - not suprisingly.  I suppose it depends in part on what type of art you are creating. Even in Illustrator some do not like any brush smoothing becasue you basically have to anticiapte how the software is going to modify the path you have actually drawn and hope you wind up with what you want. People get use to using it both ways.
    Paulo

  • Why my gradient mask at home renders smooth, but is clipped at work?

    I created a number of gradient masks applied to images with a basic 100 to 0 black gradient, on my Mac at home. They look smooth in Illustrator, and rendered smooth both as a PDF and exported to a PNG.
    Gradient Mask from my Mac at home:
    But when I open the same illustrator document on my Mac at work the gradation of the mask is clipping. So instead of a smooth transition there's now a hard line.
    Gradient Mask on my Mac at work:
    This is the same file, opened on different Macs. Both identical versions of Illustrator CS6, identical color settings, identical color profiles.
    The main differences are my Mac at home is a 2009 MacPro running OS 10.9, and my Mac at work is a 2008 MacPro running OS 10.8.
    I've created and recreated gradient masks over and over again, and I cannot get a smooth transparency gradient mask at all on my Mac at work.
    This presented a problem, as the client had to have last minute revisions when I was at work, and could not produce a smooth image, I was forced to deliver the final graphic with clipped gradient masks.

    So deleting preferences didn't fix it. I even rasterized the gradient to see if an image mask would work better, that didn't work. Then I toggled "invert mask." I was suprised to see that once I inverted the mask (which reversed the gradient), the transparency was smooth from 0 to 100.
    So I've figured out a work around for the problem, but it's still not resolved.
    Invert gradient mask
    Rotate gradient mask 180°
    Adjust gradient mask break points to accomidate reversal
    Here's the result:
    Now if someone can explain to me why a gradient mask doesn't work in one direction, but it does when it's inverted.

  • PDF dropped into Motion problem

    I created some graphic text in Illustrator, using the Extrude/Bevel effect, and saved it as an .ai file. Then I dropped the graphic into Motion. In Motion the image remains sharp even when large on the screen. The problem (and I wish I could attach a file to show it instead of describing it, but here it goes) is that in the curved areas of the text, in the smooth gradient blend in the extruded part of the text, there are horizontal lines going from the face to the back of the text. These lines appear to be banding from the blending steps, but they look smooth in Illustrator.
    Any ideas? Has anyone successfully brought text extruded in Illustrator into Motion? Motion's Extrude Filter seems a little fuzzy, so I'd prefer not to use it. Seems to rasterize the graphic when it applies the filter.

    Thank you. I had fixed resolution off. The image looked very sharp, even when enlarged. But, the lines (which are sharp) are in the curved parts of the gradiant. I Changed the bit resolution to 32-bit (it was 8-bit), but that didn't make a difference.
    I tried this experiment: Instead of bringing the .ai into Motion and letting Motion convert it to a PDF, I rasterized the graphic in Illustrator first, then saved it as a PDF with 1200 dpi. This worked getting rid of the lines and the image looked very sharp when enlarged in Motion. BUT, the file size is 97 MB (compared to 1 MB) and the graphic gets unsmooth when it is smaller on the screen. So, this is not really a solution.
    I'm guessing the problem has something to do with Motion's .ai to PDF conversion? The original in Illustrator has very mild, exceptable banding (to my eye), but when brought into Motion the bands become this sharp, thin, black lines.

  • New Fireworks fan!

    Hi,
    I've never posted in the Fireworks forum before as I had never (until recently) used this program.  I'm taking a class in it now, and I've got to say:  What an awesome program!  I never understood why anyone needed it before, but it's much faster at Web mockups than Photoshop.  I actually used to mock up Web sites in InDesign (wrong program I know) because mocking them up in Photoshop takes so long (hate having to constantly click on a layer name just to get to the object I want).   Anyway, it's got a really great selection of bitmap and vector tools -- most all the stuff I'd regularly need for a Web site.  I've watched a little more than half of the lynda.com video on this so far -- getting ready to try to understand the slicing stuff.  Looking forward to learning as much as possible.
    Okay, that's not a question, but I felt like saying how cool I think this program is.  I'll be using it a lot.  Should have studied it a long time ago....
    Thanks, Phyllis

    Yep its true its faster than Photoshop for mockups but I still have a number of niggles with it. I will add that you can select objects on screen with photoshop not having to use the layers pallet, I wrote about that a few months back here:- Quick select in photoshop.
    I wont go through all my niggles with fireworks now as I have only been using it for a few months and might find simple solutions to the issues. But one thing I will say now is I am upset that even with CS5 you can not move smoothly between illustrator and firework. Yes you can save fireworks files to illustrator 8, but come on version 8 is old and I find when opening the files in illustrator CS3 or CS5 that I cant work with it.

  • Why is the brush tool in Illustrator CC inferior to the brush tool in CS6? It has less control of fidelity and smoothness. It is terrible - and I'm an illustrator. Can I use the CS6 brush engin in CC?

    I loved the brush tool in CS6 Illustrator- by turning fidelity to the lowest setting, and smoothness down to zero, pumping up pressure sensitivity, it accurately reproduced the fine shapes of a drawn stroke. I'm an illustrator, so I don't want artificially smoothed curves, I want the line I drew.
    This works really well with my Wacom Cintiq tablet... but now CC has removed this level of customisation for the brush tool. WHY? The program is called Illustrator, and as an illustrator, I can tell you having an accurate and finely adjustable brush engine to illustrate with is very important to me and to lots of other people who can draw, and draw for a living.
    Now you get this dumbed down control panel when you double click on the brush tool icon- just one slider, with only 4 steps from 'accurate' (not very) to 'smooth' (almost indistiguishable from 'accurate')... it is like I have contracted a nerve disease - I draw a line, and it forms into something quite different to the path my pen took. WHY? Can I get rid of this rubbish engine? Trying the blob brush - what is the point of this brush? It is just like the old brush, except for a cursor that shows the largest size for pressure sensitivity... and it has the same crude 4 step smooth/accurate adjuster, that doesn't change the line much at all. I have the latest driver in my Cintiq, so I don't think that is the issue, and CS6 works better than CC.
    I am very disappointed, Adobe. Do I have to go back to CS6 for all my Illustration work? Please improve the CC brush tool controls.
    I am still reeling from Adobe's quiet removal of a whole tool: Inverse Kinematics/Bone tool from Flash CC JUST when I was finally using it to animate, but that's another story.
    Honestly, having use them for a while, Photoshop,
    Illlustrator, InDesign and Flash CC are, as far as I can tell, no step up at all from CS6, except that you have to pay for them forever.

    More on this, now becoming known as the CC pencil tool fiasco, on these fora:
    Re: PLEASE PLEASE adobe. The new pencil tool has become unusuble to me
    Re: Changing line fidelity with CS6 Brush Tool
    Re: All pressure sensitive brush presets gone!
    If you are affected by the lower accuracy controls for CC's brush or pencil tools, use this Bug report/Feature request form to let the folks at Adobe know- they are actually hopefully going to fix this.......
    thanks to Daniel for setting this up:
    hey all, if you are going to file a bug report (as per Neeraj's suggestion), i've made up a draft to make the process easier.  feel free to adjust it as much as you want, obviously; trying to equip us busy folk.
    Obviously customer service & product development are two different departments, so if you're bummin out on the new functionality, submit a bug report!
    link to submit bug report:
    https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
    ******BUG******
    Concise problem statement:
    I was told to by Neeraj N(staff) to report this issue based on this link : (http://forums.adobe.com/message/6065706).
    The Pencil / Brush tools have lost essential functionality with the addition of the new accurate / smooth adjustment preset. Users are no longer able to specify high-accuracy pen mapping, as the finest accuracy setting is now set to 2.5px (legacy versions allowed accuracy to .5px).
    I would think adding additional slider nodes to allow more accurate mapping (while still using the accurate / smooth preset) allow for a minimal change in programming with a maximum return for power users.
    Steps to reproduce bug:
    1. open illustrator
    2. use either pencil or brush tool.
    3. draw erratic and high detail shapes
    Results: shapes are smoothed to 2.5px smoothness, even when the accurate / smooth adjustment preset is set to full accuracy.
    Expected results: shapes have minimal / no smoothing to maintain the integrity of the artwork.
    Thank you for your consideration.

  • It's simple... I want the Illustrator pen tool to ALWAYS make corner annchor points and NEVER smooth.  Right now I have to convert every single one of them, or I have to do a work around every time I draw a line and make one of the handles disappear.  Is

    It's simple... I want the Illustrator pen tool to ALWAYS make corner annchor points and NEVER smooth.  Right now I have to convert every single one of them, or I have to do a work around every time I draw a line and make one of the handles disappear.  Is there some simple setting out there that will just "make it so?"@

    The video I am watching this guy is just dragging every line to make curves.  And every anchor point is a corner.  He is not switching back and forth between the pen and the anchor points tool, and he is not using the convert points tool.  He draws a curved line and starts another straight line only to curve it with a click and a drag.  It is super efficient, and I could save a world of time if I could figure out what he is doing.

  • How to smooth edges of a layer in Illustrator?

    Okay, I'm not exactly sure how to phrase my question, but I'll do my best.
    Basically I have a drawing that was made in Photoshop and now I need to make it larger. However, it gets pixellated of course. Therefore I want to put it in Illustrator and make the edges smoother (it's basically four colors that do not blend, so each color is separate).
    Is there any fairly easy way to do this? I figure I could either smooth the edges or turn it into a vector. I know Photoshop and InDesign, but I haven't used Illustrator at all, so I have no idea how to do this.
    Sorry if I wasn't clear on something, please let me know. Thank you very much!

    You can also make a path/paths out of your layer/selection in Photoshop and copy to Illie.
    It will probably be more accurate that way if you handle it right.
    Once you have pasted a path into Illie it becomes an "Object" (Illiespeak) on a layer. Illie's layers can hold many objects.
    Now all you have to do is colour it (Color ans Swatches palettes).

  • Bought a new Canon MG7540 printer to replace the old HP A618. When printing vector objects from Illustrator, they look like graphics from dandy (8 bits) ... no smooth, all cubes ... if do raster than print perfectly.  Who knows how to treat it? No well to

    Bought a new Canon MG7540 printer to replace the old HP A618. When printing vector objects from Illustrator, they look like graphics from dandy (8 bits) ... no smooth, all cubes ... if do raster than print perfectly.  Who knows how to treat it? No well to rasterize vector before each printing. OS - MacOs 10.10.

    Have you read the User's Guide for that printer?  Odds are you will get reasonable prints.  However, it is a photographic printer.  That said, it should print excellent quality photographic files.  To get smooth lines in Illustrator, try Preferences > Use Anti-Aliased Artwork.  That will smoothen the output.  If, for some reason, that does not work, try Print > Save As PDF > open PDF in Reader and print from there.  Check the User's Guide for media sizes available for your particular printer.  Setup your artboard to the size page you want the image to print on.  Use View > Show Page Tiling ( to see where the page's printable area lies.  Align the page with the artboard using the Page tool.

  • Is there a Illustrator plug in (CS4) for cleaning up/smoothing out paths fast?

    I want to clean up some vector's paths quickly, removing nodes and making the paths smoother. Does anyone know
    of a plug in for cs4 or CS6 that I can purchase or download that will help clean up my vectors faster without manually doing it myself?

    The VectorScribe plugin has a Smart Remove Point function which could be useful, though it still involves manually selecting unnecessary points. It's much more useful than Illustrator's Simplify which almost always distorts the path.
    Demo movie here:
    www.astutegraphics.com/movies/vectorscribe/pathscribe/pathscribe-smart-remove-point.mov

  • Why wont Illustrator CC let me use Alt + Scroll on my mouse to zoom in and out smoothly?

    When i use Illustrator CS6 i am able to zoom in and out smothly by pressing my option key on my Mac and then scroll with my mouse. It wont let me do that in Illustrator CC, why not? Also i should not that this zoom does not use the zoom tool on the left hand tool bar.
    Thank you for any help.

    Did Option+mouse scroll ever zoom smoothly? (Wish it did.)
    For me it zooms in hops: 50, 66.67, 100, 150, 200 etc. same as when you click with the zoom tool.
    You can of course enter exact zoom %s at the bottom left of the Illie window but that’s not smooth either.

  • Comic inking in Illustrator; brush changing with fid/smooth options off + DPI detail question

    I've used Illustrator for some time using paths, but have decided to start inking artwork as vectors as I like the sharpness and scalability.
    One of the issues I've hit is that Illustrator doesn't seem to be responsive using a Wacom 22HD when it comes to line. Firstly, I think I've got the resolution a bit out of whack. Anything above 2 point is blobby and it's hard to do fine details. Is this something to do with my DPI, my artwork not really being big enough? I've never seemed to be able to solve it.
    Of course, as the title indicates, I've also got an issue with Illustrator correcting my line all the time. It means I can't do a smooth line using my own stroke - it'll always adjust it to add a bend. I've no idea how to stop this. I've looked at issues like align to pixel, and have set fid/smooth settings to their lowest (fidelity's always 0.5 though). Any ideas?
    Thanks in advance!

    For example - drawing a tapered line in a bitmap program in illustrator, the line isn't effected. What you draw is what you get. Illustrator doesn't do this - it changes the paths after you draw it, so it's not accurate to how you draw.
    I'm assuming that I might need to increase the anchors... so there's more detail in the curve? The taper depends on the length of the stroke and pressure of course... I basically want to emulate ink, in vectors. I use another vector program professionally, Storyboard Pro, that doesn't have this problem.
    Thanks btw.

  • Adobe Illustrator CC not smooth on MBPR hi-end

    Hey,
    I just bought a MBP Retina 15" high-end (i7, 16GB RAM, SSD 512, GeForce GT 750M 2GB) perfectly clean install with Photoshop and Illustrator CC updated. This is terribly choppy (scrolling / navigation / zoom / unzoom), even when creating a new document. Everywhere else, the computer is a real bomb.
    Strangely, Photoshop, no fluidity worry.
    I also have a 27 "iMac non retina and no particular concern in Illustrator. The Retina version of the CC would it not optimized?
    Do you have a valid and acceptable solution to this problem?
    Thank you.
    EDIT:
    I downloaded a demo of SwitchResX that can display resolutions other than those of the system and I put my 15" Retina in 3840x2400px non-HiDPI and Illustrator retrieve its fluidity. So HiDPI is not optimized on Illustrator. Great Adobe.

    A 2500€ macbook shouldn't have slow down! If it can work with 3840x2400px perfectly fine, it should work with retina resolution 2880x1800px (1440x900px HiDPI)!
    Maybe a tweak or something?

  • Placed high res bitmap in Illustrator not smooth, but jagged

    In the past I would save different bitmap images in Photoshop at different resolutions, of a high quality.
    I would then position these images on a blank Illustrator artboard. (to be safe I would open the individual jpeg in Illustrator, copy and paste the object to the new artboard)
    Using CS2 I had no problems with creating good looking Illustrator documents this way.
    When I do the same thing in CS5 however, the bitmap images open up looking jagged in Illustrator.
    "Anti Aliased artwork" is ticked under preferences.
    How do I fix this?

    There is nothing particularly save about your overly complex process. First, I encourage you to save as .tif or .psd instead of .jpg. Every time you save an image as a .jpg you destroy some of the image quality. Open and save again and you destroy a bit more. Use a lossless format for better output.
    Second, y are doing nothing by copying and pasting in a new file. Illustrator does not actually open raster files (e.g. .jpg, .tif, .png), Instead it imports and embeds the raster data in a new file. Doubt me? use Illustrator to “open” a .jpg then immediately press Command-S. If you have the file open you would immediately save over the old file without having to specify a filename or a location.
    Third, you should not embed raster data in an Illustrator file unless you need to (e.g., to run an effect on it or use it as a symbol or pattern swatch). Place the file and make sure Link is checked in the Place dialogue. If you ever need to alter the original image you will soon find that extracting raster files from within Illustrator (which should be simple) is harder than getting pee out of a pool. Link and you get (1) smaller Illustrator files, (2) faster saves and opens, and (3) easier editing of the source image.
    As for the resolution question: Is Pixel Preview on in the View menu? Is there an effect applied to the image and, if so, what is the Document Raster Effect setting? Can you provide a screen shot showing the image in Photoshop and the same image at the same size in Illustrator so we can see for ourselves the difference in resolution? use the camera icon in a reply to attach the screen grab(s).

  • Adobe Illustrator CC - Smoothing does not work

    Hello,
    about this issue for a long time I know (from earlier versions of Illustrator), but until now I have decided to tell her. Perhaps someone from Adobe sees a future service. It is a fact that when
    I'm trying to figure rasterized low resolution to a higher resolution, although increasing, but does not extermination. To-pass effect function Photoshop - Gaussian blur. More can be seen on the video below.
    http://screenr.com/9HJH
    Regards
    Aleš Ulrych

    Aleš,
    You really should work in Photoshop if you wish to either increase resolution by resampling an original image or soften the appearance of insufficient resolution.
    Although there are some Photoshop like features, fundamentally Illy just sees raster images as bunches of pixels as the rest of us do.

Maybe you are looking for