When you’re done editing your image, save it as a high-quality JPEG file. That’s a little large, so we’ll reduce the size by 30%. Our image begins with dimensions of 3072×2304 pixels. If your system doesn’t have much memory or has an older processor, a large image being converted to vector may bring it to its knees. The larger your image, the more detail Live Trace will produce in the result.
Once you find an image to work with, you may want to resize it in Photoshop (Image>Image Size). For this tutorial, we’ll use an image of sunlight reflected on water. When looking at potential photos, try to find images that contain a lot of small details and also have good contrast between light and dark values. You can easily find an image of a brick wall or rusty metal to convert to vector with a quick Web search, but I prefer to use my own photos to generate unique textures. To give the typography a distinctive look, we’re going to trace a photograph and apply a portion of the result to the text.įind a suitable image that will produce a good amount of texture when traced in Illustrator. For this tutorial, we’re going to create a poster for a fictitious concert taking place in Seattle, Washington.
With Adobe Illustrator CS2, you can use the Live Trace feature to achieve a similar effect. Traditionally, if you wanted distressed-looking text in your designs, you either had to have a typeface that was designed to look that way or you had to apply filters to the text in Adobe Photoshop.