How to Vectorize an Image in Illustrator

Hi, everyone!

In this post, I am diving into another fantastic feature from Illustrator based on my Adobe Illustrator Essentials Course available at Bring Your Own Laptop. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to this course as well as my 30+ additional courses on Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Webflow, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Get started here.

In this post we are diving into the Trace Image tool that converts any image into a vectorized graphic you can edit and scale from microscopic to I-can-see-this-from-space size!

As usual, I’ll walk you through a step-by-step guide on how you can master this tool, add a few extra tips, and include some reading material for you to go deeper into the world of vector artworks and Illustrator.

 Let’s go do some math, now!

(Joking, Illustrator does it all for you, honest!)

Pixels and vectors

Before moving on, a quick brush stroke on images and vector graphics , for you to understand why this is such an incredible tool and why you should use it all the time!

Image files like .jpeg or .png are built from pixels: up to millions of colored squares that hold together to form an image.

Vector files like .svg or .eps use good old math equations (mostly invisible, so don’t be scared if you don’t ace at math) and consider shapes, borders and fills to create images.

Resolution is the strongest difference between image and vector files.

Image files lose quality when resized – you’ve all seen some blurry or pixelated results on photos you tried to enlarge. Larger sizes demand higher resolution (a higher number of pixels per inch).

They are usually the best choice for high resolution photos, image editing and graphics, printed or online.

Vector files are a sum of numbers and equations, so they can be scaled up and down, edited or transformed without losing any quality.

You must also consider size and compatibility when working with images or vector graphics. Image files, more complex and detailed, need more computer resources and are heavy for web navigation or downloads. However, they can be easily viewed, edited, and shared.

These files have less detail so they’re light on computer resources and web browsing, but editing and sharing can only be done with some specific software, like Illustrator!

They are great for illustrations, graphics and logos, projects can be printed or exported in diverse sizes and formats.

The cool thing is that you can have both image and vector combined in one project, like a business ad that features a brand logo and a stylish photograph!

Timeout #1

Check out this article at Adobe.com to learn more about pixels and vectors, image files and vector files and how to make the most of both formats.

Placing an image in an Illustrator artboard

Let’s start with a new artboard in Illustrator and place an image inside. We’ll use a .jpeg image of a Polaroid camera.

There are two ways to do this: the quick way and the lightspeed way.

Quick: we go to File on your top Menu bar and then select Place, pick the image file we want to change and hit Enter or click OK.

Lightspeed: we smash the shortcut Command + Shift + P on a Mac or Control + Shift + P on a PC and pick our file, hit Enter or click OK.

Let’s place our image. If we click once with our mouse we’ll place the image with its original dimensions; by clicking and dragging we can adjust the image size to our artboard!

Pro tip: When we are vectorizing images in Illustrator, we need to make sure we adjust the image size before getting started. Large files demand more resources from your computer and, as seen before, vector files hold less detail and resolution, so it’s ok to keep your images lightweight!

How to use Image Trace to turn an image into vector graphic

This depends on the version of Illustrator we have installed in our computers. If we’re working on a not-so-recent version, we can find the Image Trace tool by going to Object on our top Menu bar and then pick Image Trace and Make. Recent versions will have the incredible Contextual Bar hanging close to our image, eager to help. We can click on the Image Trace button and start our magic!

Image Trace first delivers its most basic result, the Default. Just a plain black and white vectorized version of our image. Sometimes it may be quite enough, if you are working with a sketch or an early logo design you want to vectorize and edit afterwards.

Now the real fun begins! We can open the Image Trace panel by clicking on its icon on our Properties panel on the right of our workspace.

If we’re working on the run, we can dramatically – and quickly – transform our vector graphics by simply adjusting the Presets and leaving the fine tuning to some other time. Let’s try the 3 Colors Preset and see how different it turns out.

Let’s try the 3 Colors Preset and see how different it turns out.

We can now explore the other settings and tweaks, remembering that this process can be very heavy on our computers and there will be a lot of annoying Progress bars on our screens. To avoid these, we can turn off the Preview option by clicking on its checkbox at the bottom of the panel, do our changes and retouches, and only then ask for a preview and see how the graphic was changed.

To keep things simple, since we are taking a Beginner’s approach to this tool, we’ll have a look at a few of the presets and leave the fine tuning for a more advanced lesson in the future.

On the top of the Image Trace panel, we can find six tracing presets that will provide us with some high-quality results, you can trust me. I’ll even use myself as a subject. Here we go!

Auto-Color – Delivers a 25 colors posterized version of our image.

High-Color – This one is amazing, giving us an 85 colors vectorized graphic with great detail.

Low Color – Creates a 16 colors version of our image, with a little more detail than Auto-Color.

Grayscale – the name says it all, right? Artwork is traced to shades of gray. Also great in detail.

Black and White – This is the Default preset, remember from above?

Outline – Traces the image to simple black outlines, as in a simplified sketch.

As we’ve seen above, there are some additional presets to choose from, make sure you explore them and have fun!

Now let’s go back to our Polaroid camera project!

Editing a traced image

To further edit a traced image, we need to release the shapes that form the vector graphic. Let’s expand it. In other words, divide it into separate objects that can be edited individually.

To do this, all we need to do is click on the Expand button from the Properties panel.

We can now see the vector graphic’s skeleton frame, with all its shapes and anchor points, and we can perform the changes we need to align it to our design.

Next, we’ll Ungroup all these objects and we’re finally ready to do some creative transformations to our traced image!

Pro Tip: Complex images may generate a complex group of shapes with way too many anchor points, so we can use the Simplify filter to make things smoother and easier to manipulate. Simplify is available in the Trace Image panel and we can activate it while tracing the original image or we can find it by going to Object on the top Menu bar and then Path and finally Simplify. Trust me, this helps a lot!

Let’s say we want to change some of these colors to better fit our client’s brand identity. We can do it the hard way, by selecting one by one all of the objects that are filled with a specific color or the easy way: simply selecting one of the objects and then going to Select on our top Menu bar, and then Same, and finally Fill Color.

Next all we need to do is click on Fill from the Appearance panel on the right of our workspace and pick the new color that will fill those objects. If we open the Color Mixer and adjust the Hue, Saturation and Brightness settings, we can see the colors change in real time on our traced object.

We can do it again for other colors and change them as well. But there’s a cool additional step as well.

How to recolor a traced image in Illustrator (short bonus tutorial)

Let’s make a Warhol-esque Pop Art composition with our Polaroid traced image.

We’ll be building this cool mosaic of cameras with all these vivid colors, so I’ll resize it to a smaller size and drag it to a corner of the artboard.

Timeout #2

Starting from the UK but quickly exploding in the US, Pop Art is an art movement that crossed the second half of the twentieth century and truly caused an impact in visual communication and graphic design.Don’t miss this article and learn how Pop Art still inspires designers in the present.

Next, we duplicate our camera. Using the Selection tool, hold Option on a Mac or Alt on a PC and drag to duplicate, and then Command + D on a Mac or Control + D on a PC to add more copies of our object.

We’ll be seeing the new Generative Recolor tool in action, but for those working on previous versions of Illustrator it’s ok to recolor them by repeating the steps I’ve shown above.

So let’s select our mosaic’s second “tile” and hit the Recolor button on the Contextual bar. You’ll love this! Next, we choose Generative Recolor and type our prompt or pick from one of the presets Illustrator holds for us.

We’ll type “happy” in the prompt field, wait a few seconds, and pick our favorite variation. Let’s make sure it’s strong and vibrant so we can achieve that Pop Art vibe!

This is an amazing feature. Now we can go absolutely wild, play around with color variations until we have a composition like the one below!

And That’s It!

Image Trace is a miracle tool for our vector artwork. We can now turn anything you like into a vector graphic, make some changes to it, and add a tsunami of color and energy to our designs! All this with a few simple clicks and a world of imagination!

What’s Next?

The tips in this post are all based on my Adobe Illustrator Essentials Course available at Bring Your Own Laptop. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to this course as well as my 30+ additional courses on Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Webflow, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Get started here.

See you in class! - Dan