Vectorizing or Rasterizing or Something?

[CarlYoung]

Hello

Its been about 11 years since I have used adobe illustrator (AI) It was for manipulating simple black and white images. I used to be able to convert these images so that every line and dot of the image had those little (blue) lines and anchor points that enabled you to manipulate each and every area of the drawing. I seem to remember having to use a separate software from AI for this. I have tried in AI going to 'object' then 'rasterize' but with no luck… Can anyone advise?
Many thanks, Mark

[Albacore]

The software you remember using was called Streamline but Adobe dropped this around when the CS version came out. They used a version of this into the programme but many users were unhappy with the results so in CS6? they made improvements to it and it is a lot better now but it still has problems with clipping masks and groupings of shapes. The area you want to look at is the "Place" command where you import your bitmap and then you will see tools on the top line which you can use. This is best explained by a tutorial which can be seen here: https://www.video2brain.com/en/lesso...th-image-trace

Hope this helps but if it is line art that you have scanned and placed in your drawing you might be better of just manually drawing the sketch using the pencil or pen tools for a cleaner drawing. The grat thing about "Live Trace" is that you can use "Live Paint" to colour your drawing and to spot stray points.

[CarlYoung]

Thanks for your response Albacor… Yes, Adobe Streamline. That was it.
I should have mentioned before that I am using a Mac osx 10.6.8 with illustrator cs. the link to the tutorial you gave shows someone going to 'window' then 'Image Trace' … I don't have this feature (nor 'live trace') in the window menu… and I couldn't really follow what you explained in your message, that is: "The area you want to look at is the "Place" command where you import your bitmap and then you will see tools on the top line which you can use."…

[mwenz]

What version of AI do you have.

[CarlYoung]

it's version 11.0 … quite old I think

[mwenz]

Prior to CS2 I believe all tracing was done in Streamline. Which would be why you don't have the option available.

As CS6 is the newest perpetual license version available, you could purchase a new license--at full price. You can sign up to Adobe's new cloud service and pay monthly payments for the right to use the software.

There are other options, like VectorMagic's on-line tracing ability. I don't know what else is available for the Mac. Sorry.

Mike