HELP !!!!!!!

[nutster44 5]

Hey guys, I could really use some help. Im trying to vectorize this photo so I can cut it but I can not get anywhere with it. Any help would be appreciated. This is a photo on a shirt if it can be vectored I just need the white areas and to have them cleaned up...Thanks guys..

[haumana 1,220]

It's rough and you'll need to do your own clean up on it.help.eps

[nutster44 5]

Thank you very much haumana, I appreciate your work..

[darcshadow 1,626]

nutster, Did you try to vectorize it yourself, and if so, what problems were you having and what software did you use. This is a pretty basic design, and a simple 2 color one so an auto trace should do reasonably well, or a manual trace should be rather easy. Haumana gave you a trace already, but this would be a good image to practice your tracing options.

[nutster44 5]

Im working with Illustrator and I tried about every configuration to get it to come out but had no luck. Im a newb at the vectoring process..

[Wildgoose 4,200]

You will find that the auto trace feature is only so-so on a good day. I hand trace (manual with the pen tool) almost everything. With a little practice you can do it faster than doing an auto trace and spending so much time trying to clean it up after. The computer just can't judge what it's supposed to be doing very well unless the graphic happens to be nice and black on a clean white background. Even in those situations it will create stacked nodes and oddities that make any kind of further manipulation a time consuming process. 

Start with the outer most edge and use the pen tool not the pencil tool. There are tutorials on proper tracing, in a nutshell with AI you have to learn to judge the proper place to put a node and you then click and drag and it will pull out the handles. Sometimes you mess something up on one side of the node. Not to worry because you can go back and move or adjust the position or handle length if you need to. AI uses multi keypad input at the same time as mouse work so it's a two handed affair but once learned is very fast. For instance. IF, while you are starting to drag out your handles you realize you have put it in the wrong place you just use your thumb on the spacebar and it will stop dragging the handles and let you reposition the node, then you release the spacebar and continue what you were doing. There are other options that do similar things like constraining the line angle flat vertical or at a 45 and if you press the option (mac) alt(pc) it will change the node type from a smooth into a hard corner etc... Like I said takes some learning but if you plan to do this a lot you will never regret the effort to improve your abilities.

I start out the outside and work my way in. In other words the outside is the lowest layer in the stack and then each inner area is on top of that layer. After they are all done if you want to knock those sections out of the back creating the open design that you show then you can use the pathfinder tools to do that. ALSO I work with unfilled and unstroked lines so that there is no color going on other than the layer color. Add your fills in later and I rarely use any stroke color at all. Your cutter will not cut stroke effects so keep it all filled objects. 

This may not make sense to you at this stage but it will as you learn. There are some other helpful set-up notes in a sticky post in the Adobe Illustrator section of the forum. Good luck. AI is a powerful tool but the learning curve is steep.