Today’s creative endeavor involved taking what I learned about Adobe Illustrator at the awesome demo during Wednesday’s class meeting and applying it to yesterday’s camera-ready calligraphy for a wedding invitation. I placed the Photoshop document in Illustrator and then Live Traced it to make a vector image. The first Live Trace was pretty much a bust because I didn’t change any of the preset settings.
But I kept experimenting with the settings and got something that looks pretty good at 100% even if it looks lousy at, say, 400%. I tried using the Smooth Tool, to transform bumpy lines into smooth curves, but I must have been doing something wrong there, or had a setting wrong somewhere. I succeeded on the entrance stroke to a J, shown above left but not on the straight bit. The right figure is part of a J elsewhere on the camera-ready, untouched. You can see the difference in the smoothness of the curve — but probably only if you click on the thumbnail and look at the image full size. And, on another note, wouldn’t it be nice if the thickness of that upstroke had a more gradual thinning so that there wasn’t some much thinness between the upstroke and the stem? A 400% view of lettering is way harsh, man.
I have illustrator CS so i don’t have live trace that came with the next edition.
One of these days I will upgrade.
I know people use it.
As for smoothing I do use it.
Play with the settings in smoothing.
opps I mean try the simplify path that is what I use.
Not sure if all this helps
Beth, would you mind if I tag you? The info will be on my blog. Please respond if you want to and/or if you have time. Carol
Toni, Live Trace is da bomb! I’ve stumbled my way through the process and finally (I think — I’m waiting to hear from the client) got an acceptable vector image of my invitation. I would love to see a tutorial on editing lettering in Illustrator, or even Photoshop.