Here is a "Revolutionary" way of creating paths in Illustrator

[Jakobud]

Well I'm not sure if this is really 'revolutionary' or not... but I just discovered this after messing around a little bit, and it saves hours and hours of work.

I have discovered a way to import paths from Photoshop into Illustrator.  Why would I want to do that you ask? Simple. Check this out:

1. You open your high res raster image in Photoshop and also in Illustrator.

2. In Photoshop, use the wand tool to easily select any type of shapes you want in the original raster image.  Mess with the Wand Tolerance at the top of the toolbar.  Usually (depending on the image quality) I find that a value between 32-64 works good.

 - Now you have a 'selection' that is almost exactly the same shape you would normally have made a path of in Illustrator right? If only we could get this into Illustrator...

3. Open the "Path Palette".  At the bottom there is a button called "Make Work Path from Selection."   Hold down the ALT key and click that button.

4. A dialog appears asking for a tolerance value.  You can enter a value between 0.5 - 10 (in 0.1 value increments).  The lower the value, the closer the resulting path will be to resemble the original shape of the selection.  The higher the value, the less it will resemble it.  It depends on how complicated a shape you have, but for me I found that a value between 0.6 - 1.0 worked the best.  Feel free to experiment.

5. So now you have a path!  Now lets get this into Illustrator!  Press 'A' on the keyboard to choose the "Direct Selection Tool."

6. Click and drag a selection window around your ENTIRE path.  

7. Now select and drag the path into the document you have open in Illustrator.

8. Give Illustrator a few seconds to import the path... and PRESTO!  Your path is in!  Now just line up the path with the background raster image you opened earlier.  


Now this path is not perfect.  It is most likely not as good as it would have looked if you would have originally drawn it yourself by hand.  But this whole thing gets you literally 95% of the way there!    Now all you have to do is go around the path, add or remove and tweek the spline handles to get the shape exactly how you want it.  Boom! You are done!

I had this one long and very detailed path that took me 45 minutes to create and tweak. ... but this method only took 5 minutes or less....

Another nice thing about this method is that you can create tons of paths at once in Photoshop and import them all at the same time into Illustrator.  This method I have discovered is saving me tens of hours on a special (and very detailed) sideart picture I'm working on.

Let me know what you guys think!

[patrickl]

Sounds like a good idea yes. I was wondering if there wasn't an easier way to do this.

Maybe you dan even use the range selection tool? You could in one go select all selections of a certain color.

I'm still working on the Galaga bezel and I''m nearly going crazy with all the dots and blurbs on it.

[Witchboard]

Very cool.  I totally suck at vectorizing.  Well, I'm sure I would get better with practice, but this will help out tons.  Thanks for the tip and something new to play with.

[Jakobud]

Sounds like a good idea yes. I was wondering if there wasn't an easier way to do this.

Maybe you dan even use the range selection tool? You could in one go select all selections of a certain color.

I'm still working on the Galaga bezel and I''m nearly going crazy with all the dots and blurbs on it.

Well thats the point of the Wand selection tool.  You can click a colored area on your image and select entire area/color (contiguous or non-contiguous) given a tolerance.

Basically, this whole process works with any sort of selection tools you want to use, but for our needs, usually the Wand is going to be the most important.

[patrickl]

Well with the Galaga bezel there are a million whit stars and the planets are covered with millions of small colored specs too. I didn't see how the wand would select all those (apart from clicking on every colored dot) I tried selecting them with the color range and it brought out all the objects in one go. Really cool!

Of course it's still a lot of work to correct the shapes, but, as you said, it helps a lot in getting the initial objects placed.

Thanks!

BTW it works better if the resolution is higher. I doubled the resolution of my Galaga bezel pics and then it worked a lot better. Some fiddling with the levels (to get rid of noise) helped clear up things a lot too.

[Jakobud]

Patrick,  In order to avoid having to click on every single star, take a look at the "Contiguous" option for the Wand.  That will basically select everything in the image that is over the same color as what you manually select all at once.  It will keep you from having to click on every single one, but it might also select more than what you want.  Experiment with it and you will see that will help you.

[patrickl]

Geez, yeah that's about the same thing as using the "eye dropper plus" in the color range selection. But then the wandtool is easier yes since you can see the selection better and it's easier to undo bad additions to the selection.

Thanks again!

[darktemp]

Great tip, I'm trying to vectorize a Spider-man with limited colors and this will be 100x faster.

[Witchboard]

I'm having a problem with #7.  Can you elaborate on that step a bit?  Select it with what, how?  The only I've to up to #6 just fine but after that, the only thing I've been able to do is drag the entire picture over to Illustrator.

[darktemp]

Witchboard, I found that you can also just do file/export/paths to illustrator instead of dragging them.  When I opened them in ai I couldn't see them without highlighting them though because the paths were white.

[Jakobud]

Witchboard, well it helps first if you just turn off/hide or perhaps lock the layer that the raster image is on.  This prevents from you from being able to select it at all.  Next make sure when you select your path that you drag a rectangle selection box around the ENTIRE thing.  If you dont get the whole thing, then you just select certain path points, and when you drag that or move it, some points move, the unselected ones don't, therefore distorting and stretching your paths.

[Witchboard]

Thanks guys.  I'll give it another shot when I get home today.