How to Vectorize Any Image in Illustrator

..without touching the pen tool.

Disclaimer: I teach an in-depth course about Image Trace I will be introducing at the bottom.

So, you need a vector.

You quickly look online and find out about Image Trace in Illustrator. You try it, and it’s amazing! But for some reason it isn’t doing a good job.

You come to a simple conclusion:

Image trace sucks.

It can’t understand your images like it should. But it’s not Image Trace’s fault, it’s just doing that it knows how to do.

Image trace measures the Hue, Saturation, and Value of each pixel, then compares the pixel to its neighbors. It groups similar sections, and calls it a shape. What it considers a shape depends on the settings chosen.

*Light bulb*

What if I can change the images so that Image Trace can better pick out the shapes?

By pre-editing in Photoshop images to have groups of pixels with more clearly defined boundaries…