• Adobe Illustrator

  Live trace – can you limit the trace to parts of a bitmap image?

  Posted by Amy Fierstein on September 14, 2009 at 3:16 am

  I have a photograph of a person, and I want to make just his hair and clothing look cartoon-like. I’ve been playing around with the live trace tool, but can’t figure if it’s even possible to apply live trace to just those parts of the photograph. Do I have to rasterize the image first? Do I create clipping paths for the hair and clothing and then use live trace?

  Amy Fierstein replied 16 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Vincent Rosati

  September 14, 2009 at 4:08 am

  The trace applies to the entire raster image.
  You could duplicate the raster, trace it, expand it, than just grab the vector objects that you need to add to the original raster.

  Depending on the complexity of the shapes, maybe you could draw the portions that you need?

  Just a few ideas

  Vince

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• 

  Amy Fierstein

  September 14, 2009 at 5:18 pm

  Thank you! I duplicated the image, brought it into Illustrator, used live trace, and then brought it back into photoshop as another layer, and masked out the portions I didn’t want. I was hoping there was a shortcut, but it looks good, so problem solved!

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