Convert to Vector? Please Help Im Think Im in Trouble!

[Bam]

I will start off by saying I have no real experience in Illustrator and need help because Im in way over my head and need advice on what to do. I was asked to make this design for a friends car (half car vinyl) I had no idea how to do it but felt like I could I have experience with photoshop cs so I felt good. I made the design on a 1000x800 per side of the car at 72pixels per inch. You probably already know where Im going with this.... So when I sent my design to the print company they said it wasnt at a high enough resolution so now what do I do? I have heard converting to vector files works but am clueless on how to do it. Im embarrassed to have worked in photoshop for so long and know so little about how this works with the whole scaling thing as well as my lack of time with Illustrator.

He has a deadline with photoshoot in a week and I think Im totally screwed. I need help.

Heres one side of the design in jpg just for the upload. What does everyone think Im figuring all is lost and I need to start over from scratch. This was over 70 layers and I took over 20 hours making it.

[Albacore]

It depends on how you built up your swoosh's and swirls in PS! Did you use custom shapes or the Pen Tool to do these as that means there vector and can be exported as paths into AI. If they are take the shadows off first as they can be put back later in AI. Really we want to keep the drawing as simple as possible. All the text can be easily done in AI the same way that you did it in PS. The Skoobie logo will be easily found on the net as a AI format or EPS which means they are vector and can be scaled to any size so that can be placed in a layer. Is your sizes that you state inches, cm, mm or pixels

If you constructed the chevron stripes as a pixel brush or path gain simplify the drawing by removing the shadow in PS and try copy and pasting into a new layer in you AI doc. What I am really saying if all your work is all pixel based then you will have to try to place the file into AI and then try the Trace function in AI. Either have two docs opened or two different artboards in AI, one with the PS document settings, CTRL+N will bring up the page size:- the other doc is the car size. "Place" your PS into the first artboard, this is done from the File menu, then on the top of the artboard window you will see "Image Trace" click on the small triangle to the side and select "Black & White Logo" you will then see the results of this trace. Now I always think the result that you get from this trace is not great it is up to you to choose but you now can "Expand" your trace and copy & paste it into your full size car doc and then resize it to its full size without loosing any detail. Again if I was in your shoes I would leave both the text layers & logo out of your PS doc and now do them as full size in your new doc in the topmost layer. For printing purposes the best way to do Shadows is to use the Blend Tool, duplicate the shape twice and off set one shape to the amount of shadow that you want then change the colour of the 2 one black the other yellow and Blend the two together using the "steps" mode, 25 is about right for your size.

If you find that the trace is crap then you have two choices either use Vector Magic to convert you PS file from raster into vector or get back into PS set all your raster preferences to 300 dpi and get drawing again with full size artboard. If you were OK at using AI this type of drawing would only take around 4 hrs to do but that's not the case so I have tried to make it easy for you but I have missed a few things out so not to confuse you. Do search "Illustrator Image Trace" and "exporting paths from PS to AI" if you have used custom shapes or Pen Tool for swooshes & swirls. It is good that you have used layers in PS you might be able to do most things in PS but it would depend on the units you have used in your original drawing artboard. If you get stuck I will try and help but you might have to export your file to the clouds so that I can give hep on your AI drawing. By the way welcome to Talk Graphics.