How to vectorize an image

A pic­ture cre­at­ed by a dig­i­tal cam­era is called a raster or bitmap image. Those images are made out of a rec­tan­gu­lar matrix of pix­els (points of col­or), and a pix­el is the small­est pic­ture ele­ment on a dis­play screen.

Vec­tor images are graph­ics made up of points, lines, and curves  that are built by math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las. Vec­tor graph­ics are res­o­lu­tion-inde­pen­dent and you can do unlim­it­ed resiz­ing with­out los­ing any of the image qual­i­ty in the process. It comes quite handy when you want to print an image in dif­fer­ent sizes or make some dig­i­tal art graphics.

This tuto­r­i­al will show you how to turn pix­elized image for­mat to vec­tor image in Adobe Illus­tra­tor. And you can check some of our oth­er tuto­ri­als on how to use Adobe Pho­to­shop.

Creating a Vector in Adobe Illustrator

Step 1. Open raster image

Open your image file (JPG, PNG, etc.) in Illus­tra­tor by click­ing File > Open. 

We choose this ice-cream image, but you can check mil­lion of oth­er free high-qual­i­ty pho­tos on Wun­der­stock website.

Step 2. Open Image Tracing Workspace

 Illus­tra­tor has a spe­cial tool called Image Trace for vec­tor­iz­ing images. You can find it by fol­low­ing these nav­i­ga­tion steps:  Win­dow > Work­space > Tracing

Step 3. Select the image and check the Preview button

It will now open a new work­space tab which will become active once you select the insert­ed image. The icon is in the top right angle of the Con­trol pan­el and looks like this .

In the Image Trace pan­el click on the Pre­view but­ton (bot­tom-left cor­ner).  This way you can see the out­line of an image in vec­tor format.

Step 4. Choose Preset option

Now it is time to play around with pre­sets depend­ing on the effect you want to achieve. Check out the Pre­set drop-down menu and choose the one that fits your need. Pre­sets are the pre-deter­mined con­fig­u­ra­tion of set­tings that will auto­mat­i­cal­ly be applied to the image after choos­ing one.

These are your options:

• Cus­tom - if you are a begin­ner in using Illus­tra­tor, we sug­gest you some of the oth­er pre­set options from the list until you get the feel of what effect you want to achieve.
• High Fideli­ty Pho­to — pho­to­re­al­is­tic high-qual­i­ty vec­tor reproduction.
• Low Fideli­ty Pho­to - fair­ly sim­i­lar to High Fideli­ty effect but cre­ates a sim­pli­fied vec­tor outline.
• 3 Col­ors, 6 Col­ors, and 16 Col­ors — pret­ty much self-explana­to­ry pre­sets.  The vec­tor image will have a range of three, six, or 16 colors.

• Shades of Grey - grayscale vec­tor­ized image. 
• Black and White Logo - basi­cal­ly what the name is say­ing. Cre­ates a sim­ple logo in B&W colors.
• Sketched Art, Sil­hou­ettes, Line Art, and Tech­ni­cal Draw­ing — cre­ates sim­pli­fied B&W draw­ings out of a pho­to for­mat. If you are, or plan­ning to become a sten­cil artist this option will def­i­nite­ly make your life much easier.

Step 5. Adjust Paths, Corners, and Noise

You can fur­ther advance your vec­tor image by adjust­ing Paths, Cor­ners, and Noise.

• Paths - Drag­ging the slid­er to the right makes the vec­tor with more accu­rate cor­ner points, while drag­ging it to the left/lower val­ue will cre­ate smoother edges.
• Cor­ners - This option will make image cor­ners sharp­ened in case of high­er val­ue and smoother in case of low­er value.
• Noise — if you drag the slid­er to the left, the vec­tor will pick up most of the details from the orig­i­nal image. If you drag it to the right/higher val­ue most of the image areas will not be vis­i­ble in the out­look. The low­er the num­ber, few­er pix­els need­ed, so there will be a more detailed (or noisy) trace. The high­er the num­ber, the more areas of an image will be ignored, and the vec­tor will be in much less detail.

Step 6. Click the Trace button

Once you are sat­is­fied with your vec­tor result, uncheck the Pre­view option (this is a real­ly impor­tant step, oth­er­wise the Trace but­ton will not be active) and click the Trace in the bot­tom right cor­ner of the Image Trace panel.

Step 7. Expand the image

The last thing you need to do before Illus­tra­tor starts con­vert­ing your image into a vec­tor is click­ing on the Object > Expand but­ton, and you will see the blue lines that Illus­tra­tor rec­og­nized as the vec­tor image. It looks some­thing like this:

Step 8. Save the vector image

If there are some areas or an object you want to delete before sav­ing the image, you can select the path you don’t like and hit the back­space but­ton.  In the end, all you have to do is save the image by click­ing on File > Save As and choose a vec­tor image for­mat. There are a vari­ety of vec­tor image for­mats (PDF, AI, EPS, SVG). The most com­mon ones are PDF for print or SVG for web. We choose SVG format.

If you haven’t done any heavy edit­ing in the pre­set sec­tion, your vec­tor­ized image will look pret­ty much the same as the raster image. Only when you zoom in the image and check for details, you will notice that the vec­tor will not pix­e­late no mat­ter how many times you enlarge the image, while the raster image will lose res­o­lu­tion qual­i­ty when enlarged.

Now you have learned how to vec­tor­ize an image. You may not be able to do it per­fect­ly in the first time, but don’t get dis­cour­aged. After cou­ple of “tri­al and error” you will be sat­is­fied with the final result.