For the featured band’s name, we chose a bold version of the American Typewriter font set to around 70 points. Use a relatively large point size for your text and leave the Fill color as black. Choose the Type tool (T) and type on your artboard outside the tracing. First, you need to figure out which parts you want to use by seeing how the texture will appear with the text. As such, you’ll delete a good portion of it. You won’t use all of the tracing to distress the text. You could just as easily work with the white objects by deleting the black with the Magic Wand tool however, you’ll need to apply a different color fill to the white objects so they’re visible on the document’s white background. Choose the Magic Wand tool (Y), select the white, and then press the Delete (PC: Backspace) key. We want to work only with the black objects. Select the tracing and choose Object>Expand. When you’re done making adjustments in this dialog, click the Trace button to trace the image.īefore we can work with the tracing, we need to convert it to paths. This produced a good amount of small details to use on the text. With a bit of adjustment, we settled on a value of 70. For our image, we found the default value of 128 didn’t show as much detail as we wanted. Typically, the only setting we change in the Tracing Options is the Threshold value, which controls how much black or white appears in the image. The trace will output in black and white, as two colors are easier to work with for this technique. In the dialog that appears, enable the Preview option. This allows you to modify any settings and preview the image before conversion. Select the image with the Selection tool (V) and choose Object>Live Trace>Tracing Options.
Not to worry: We’ll delete much of the tracing a few steps from now. Although we modified the image’s dimensions, it’s still larger than the document’s artboard. In Illustrator, open your image by choosing File>Open. STEP 3 Open in Illustrator Begin the Live Trace When you’re done editing your image, save it as a high-quality JPEG file. That’s a little large, so we’ll reduce the size by 30%. Our image begins with dimensions of 3072×2304 pixels. If your system doesn’t have much memory or has an older processor, a large image being converted to vector may bring it to its knees. The larger your image, the more detail Live Trace will produce in the result. Once you find an image to work with, you may want to resize it in Photoshop (Image>Image Size). For this tutorial, we’ll use an image of sunlight reflected on water. When looking at potential photos, try to find images that contain a lot of small details and also have good contrast between light and dark values. You can easily find an image of a brick wall or rusty metal to convert to vector with a quick Web search, but I prefer to use my own photos to generate unique textures. To give the typography a distinctive look, we’re going to trace a photograph and apply a portion of the result to the text.įind a suitable image that will produce a good amount of texture when traced in Illustrator. For this tutorial, we’re going to create a poster for a fictitious concert taking place in Seattle, Washington. With Adobe Illustrator CS2, you can use the Live Trace feature to achieve a similar effect. Traditionally, if you wanted distressed-looking text in your designs, you either had to have a typeface that was designed to look that way or you had to apply filters to the text in Adobe Photoshop.