motoxchic 33 Posted November 5, 2012 Not sure if this should be in Vectorizing forum, so please feel free to move if so... Before I spend many more hours on this, was wondering if I could get some advice on this image. I used Live Trace CS6 and with some (ok a lot of) manual changes. I have got it to the point below. I have not tried to cut it yet. Wondering what the best way is to get from A to B. The original image is a vector drawing, i rasterized it then did the live trace. There is probably a cleaner way to do this. I am having issues with her hands and the live trace, so I Live Traced them individually and have them "laid over" the original silhouette (pic on right). In Sign Cut Pro the shoe bows are not showing in color (only black) and the part where i laid over the hands has a block around it. I have just started using CS6 and vinyl is new to me. Just seems like i am taking the hard way around starting with a Vector already. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wildgoose 4,200 Posted November 10, 2012 I have rarely been happy with any live trace images to try and cut. If it's something that I want to look good I usually maually trace the object. It's much more time consuming but the resuts for vinyl are far superior. Live trace on a black image on white background will yeid ok results but even then there are often weird little protrusions or rounded lines that should have been straight. If you are going for a colored item like the pic you uploaded there are just so many colors involved that live trace tries to take into account that it gets confused. All the gradients and shaddow effects throw it off. Where that is a vector you might try picking it apart by removing the gradients and changing the colors to the point your happy with it. Going to a raster then back just causes messy lines where you won't want them. With practice you will get faster. I would allocate about 30 minutes to that image. Also if you are using SignCut you might be having some input issues. I have to down-save everything to illustrator 8 to get good results in SC. I like the idea of live tracing the hands individualy to get them closer to how you like them. You should be able to merge them togother for a full image and maybe you can go through the nodes and clean the image up to be satisfactory. Good luck. I learned the hard way that there's really no easy button for a clean image. You might try using the plotter option with some butcher paper for the first time to avoid wasting vinyl. I am assuming your cutter has a pen attachment. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
