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Illustrator CS6 Tracing

2169 Views 9 Replies 5 Participants Last post by  ProSeparatorNJ, 
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Adobe updated the tracing in Illustrator CS6. As much as I've been complaining about bugs and pointless changes in Illustrator CS6, this is one part that Adobe really just knocked it out of the park. The tracing quality went from pretty darn good depending on what you feed it to spectacular on pretty much everything I've fed it so far. My theory had been that Illustrator only returned great results on art that was already pretty good. Now, it's making magic results from low resolution stuff. They also created a tracing "palette" that docks on the right with the other palettes which is pretty cool. But the results caught me off guard. Especially the first thing I tried to trace. It was so good that I just figured I'd fed it a piece of art which was already good. But each attempt after that with different quality art had a similarly impressive result. Too bad it isn't still a separate product. Not too many people will buy Illustrator just for the tracing feature but it really is great now.
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Yeah - I found the same. Was very interested to see how it had improved from CS5 and from my experience, much better. I'm actually waiting to try it on some hand-drawn pencil artwork from a friend. Hoping for even better results than I anticipated, now I've read your review!

I just upgraded.

However, I'm on subscription. So with my "current customer" discount I get an insane bunch of adobe programs for something like $30 a month, with cloud storage thrown in

Well worth it in my opinion.

Richie
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quick rough greyscale conversion.

original artwork source. low quality resolution : Eternal Seven » Pencil Sketch of a Knight

Richie

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To be honest, I think cs5 got better results with tracing. Especially with pencil sketches. In cs5 the results I've gotten look identical to the sketch. It has that "sketch" look. When I got cs6, I retraced some sketches and it has a cartoony, cell shaded look like a video game. It still looks good, but it depends on what look you like. I noticed in your cs6 result, to me it too has that cartoon look, but it is definitely a nice result, and I really like it! I am impressed with how fast cs6 is, and I love being able to see the original to compare. So I may end up tracing in cs5, and playing with things in cs6.
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here is the CS5 version of the same image.

I also think that for pencil drawings the earlier version has given a more realistic representation.

Which is a shame, because CS6 had performed so well under the other tests I tried out and was pretty darn quick! Would have been nice to have both results as options. Saying that, I've only quickly messed with the trace settings, so perhaps there's the possibility to eek out more detail somehow.

Richie

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The CS6 version definitely looks better to my eyes. The CS5 result looks blobby and really loses the sketch look. Looking at both results I'm now more impressed with CS6.
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Why would you vector a pencil sketch? Much quicker and better to scan into Photoshop and sep. You could do that with a multi grey index and it would look amazing!
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madmandesign said:
Why would you vector a pencil sketch? Much quicker and better to scan into Photoshop and sep. You could do that with a multi grey index and it would look amazing!
Click to expand...
For T-shirts, I would agree. I'm actually looking forward to printing a collection of hand-drawn artwork in a collaboration with my designer friend for one of my clothing brands. (Out of interest, how many greys do you think would be needed for something like the above sketch?)

However, I am also looking into blowing up some of my friend's work for a few large format art pieces. The sketches I will get will be on A4 size. I've yet to check what resolution my scanner can catch and see what size I can blow it up to without pixelation, but as an exercise I was interested to see how far the trace function could be taken on a pencil sketch in illustrator

Richie
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the few times I have used it I think that it is much better in CS6.
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madmandesign said:
Why would you vector a pencil sketch? Much quicker and better to scan into Photoshop and sep. You could do that with a multi grey index and it would look amazing!
Click to expand...
I agree. I would only vector a pencil sketch if I were experimenting with some artistic angle, but never for the purpose of separations. I believe the reason most people vectorize sketches is because they want to bring the art into Illustrator where they are better skilled at manipulating it. To keep more of the detail, it should be processed in Photoshop where you have every possible tool at your disposal to manipulate the art.
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