April 01, 2004

Curious George: Back in the day I used Adobe Streamline to convert pictures to line art. Is there a more modern tool for acomplishing the same task?

I use a Mac and need something that is OS X native. If you know how to do this inside Illustrator (not hand tracing) I would appreciate any tips.

  • In Illustrator CS, there's a tool called the Auto Trace tool. It's one up from the scissors on the right-hand side of the tool palette. It's not fully automatic, but it tries to help you along. Check the online help for Auto Trace, and that should give you some extra pointers.
  • If your goal is clean, sharp static images, Illustrator's autotrace will help, but unless your starting point is a high contrats, low-detail image, you'll need hand fine tuning, there's no other way. If it's moving images what you're after (the Rotoshop look?), something like the CutOut filter in AfterEffects, applied to your fooatge, might work, with above caveats.
  • Open the image in Photoshop. Posterize it or convert it to greyscale - if you're posterizing, your objective is to render the image in discrete color bands as though expecting to silkscreen it. In greyscale, play with the contrast (in Curves or under the Contrast slider) until you've pushed the image close to pure black and white. You may just want to go all the way and convert to bitmap and back to greyscale to finalize the conversion. Then use the wand to create selections, and convert the selections to paths. The paths can be cut and pasted into Illustrator, or you can use them to create new layers with fill in PS. Alternatively, export the individual selections (in the case of colors) to new photoshop files, like seps, and trace in Illustrator. Good luck!
  • Thank you all for your suggestions. These should allow me to do what needs to be done. It is a shame that Adobe hasn't upgraded Streamline (or incorporated a true heir into illustrator) as I loved some of the unpredictable results you could get from it. A chocolate-dipped frozen banana to each of you.
  • I hear Autotrace, a free, open-source tool, pretty much rules the field.