Image Trace - Illustrator technical notes
to create an image traced photo on illustrator you first have to open your image file, you have to then select the image using the selection tool.
to open the image trace palate you go (window-image trace) this will then open a drop down menu which allows you to view different versions or combinations of image trace such as the tracing result, the outlines of the tracing result or the source image, the one i used was 'tracing result' you can then change the tracing modes which changes the colours of your image trace you can choose colour, black and white or greyscale, i selected 'colour'. The next step is where you select the palette you can choose from automatic, limited or full range of tones; i used 'full tone'. You can then choose how many colours you want the image to trace, the higher the slider the more blocks of colour that will be traced, when i did this i used around 10-15 colours as i wanted it to be quite blocky.
You can then choose to use the advance settings such as 'paths' - this determines how many anchor points are used to create more detailed shapes, to create my image trace i used much lower paths.
another tool i used in advanced settings was corners i used a low setting for corners because it makes the outlines on the trace much smoother. You then have to turn the noise higher as this makes the trace shapes a lot more simple, change the method to overlap rather than abutting because we want the shapes to overlap as abutted shapes can leave gaps between them. the final thing that needs to be done is de-select snap curves to lines this will stop the image trace from trying to find and follow straight lines which is better for text not image. you then click the trace button and then click expand in the control bar at the top of the window.
once you have got to this stage and have a traced image you have a group of vector shapes which you can see behind the blue lines, i selected the image with the selection tool, you can then use the live paint bucket tool to drop fill areas with blocks of colour. like the image below.
this is the result once the image trace was de-selected and you are just left with the blocks of colour in the different vector shapes.
i then filled in to some of the darker areas with a darker shade of pink to add tone to the image to make it clear that it was still a face.
i also did it with this image, i used different tones of blues to create a live paint bucket image that still kept the different tones that were left from the image trace.
this is another way to use use the image trace, rather than fill the image using the live paint bucket tool i have instead used a background behind the image and then deleted sections of the image to show the background through.
Another image trace tool you can use is clipping masks, this is how you create them:
i selected the image trace result then ungrouped the selection then i selected the multiple shapes i wanted to use and turned the multiple shapes into a compound path to make my clipping mask and inserted the image behind.
i then select both the compound path and the image and create the clipping mask, i had to do this multiple times because i wanted lots of specific parts of the image to contain the pattern.
this is how you create the clipping mask (object)>(clipping mask)>(make)
this is how you create the clipping mask (object)>(clipping mask)>(make)
This is what my image for the clipping mask looks like, i used a pattern behind the image as i think this looks more interesting and relates better to Stefan Sagmeisters work.
