How to Use Image Trace in Adobe Illustrator (Complete Tutorial)

QUICK ANSWER: Place your image → Window → Image Trace → choose the preset that matches your art (B&W Logo for marks, 6 Colors for illustrations) → check Ignore White under Advanced → tune Threshold and Paths → hit Expand. That's the whole spine of it. Everything below is the judgment calls that separate a clean trace from a melted one.

Image Trace is the tool design pros actually use to rescue low-resolution logos, digitize hand lettering, and convert scans into editable art. It's also the tool most people use wrong, because its defaults are tuned for photos, not logos. This is the complete walkthrough, including the settings almost nobody touches.

Before you trace: fix the source

Sixty seconds of prep beats twenty minutes of slider fiddling. In order of impact:

• Find the biggest version of the image you can. Check the company's press page, an old email attachment, the original designer. Doubling source resolution improves the trace more than any setting.
• Crop away everything that isn't the art. Backgrounds, drop shadows, watermarks — Image Trace will faithfully trace all of it.
• Boost contrast if the art is faint (a quick Levels pass in any editor). Trace decisions are contrast decisions.

Step 1: Place and select

File → Place (Shift+Cmd+P), drop the image on the artboard, click it with the Selection tool. The Image Trace controls only activate with a raster image selected.

Step 2: Open the real panel

Window → Image Trace. The Control-bar preset dropdown is a subset; the panel exposes Threshold, Paths, Corners, Noise, and the Advanced section where the important checkboxes live.

Step 3: Choose the preset by art type

Your art	Preset	Then adjust
One-color logo, line art, signature	Black and White Logo	Threshold
Flat-color illustration, mascot, badge	6 Colors (or 3)	Color count, Paths
Hand lettering, ink drawing scan	Sketched Art	Threshold, Noise
Photograph	High Fidelity Photo	Reconsider — photos usually shouldn't be traced

Step 4: The five settings that matter

• Threshold (B&W modes): the darkness cutoff. Thin strokes disappearing? Raise it. Letters bleeding together? Lower it. Work in increments of 10–15.
• Paths: how tightly curves hug the original. 90%+ for geometric logos; 75–85% for organic art where slight smoothing helps.
• Corners: how eagerly Illustrator makes a sharp point instead of a curve. Crank it for angular logos, drop it for script lettering.
• Noise: ignores specks below N pixels. Scanned art wants 25–50; clean digital sources can sit at 10.
• Ignore White (Advanced): check it, almost always. Without it, every white region becomes a filled white shape — the #1 cause of "why does my sticker have a white box around it."

Toggle the Preview checkbox as you go. Trace quality is judged at 100% zoom, not fit-to-window.

Step 5: Expand — the point of no return

Click Expand in the Control bar. The live trace becomes actual paths. Before you expand, save a copy with the live trace intact — once expanded, the sliders are gone and re-tuning means starting over.

Step 6: Cleanup like a professional

1. Ungroup (Shift+Cmd+G) so pieces are individually editable.
2. Click one stray speck, then Select → Same → Fill Color, then Delete — clears every speck of that color at once.
3. Object → Path → Simplify to cut excess anchor points (aim for the fewest points that hold the shape).
4. Fix wobbly straight edges with the Direct Selection tool (A): select the edge's anchors and align them (Align panel works on anchors too).

Step 7: Export for print

Convert text to outlines (Type → Create Outlines), then save as PDF (Press Quality) or AI. If the art runs to the sticker edge, extend it 0.125" past the trim line for bleed — full specs in our Printing Guide and File Setup Guide.

Troubleshooting the classic failures

• Letters look melted: source too small for type. Retype the text with a matched font instead of tracing it (WhatTheFont identifies most).
• Curves look like polygons: Paths too low, or you're tracing a heavily JPG-compressed file. Find a PNG source.
• File is enormous / Illustrator lags: High Fidelity preset on a photo. That's expected — and the sign you shouldn't be tracing that image.
• Trace ignores faint pencil lines: raise Threshold, or darken the scan first.

FAQ

Image Trace vs. the old Live Trace?

Same feature — renamed and improved in CS6. Tutorials mentioning Live Trace map one-to-one to today's panel.

Can Image Trace do gradients?

It approximates them as banded steps of flat color. For true gradients, rebuild them manually on the traced shapes with the Gradient tool.

Is there an Image Trace on iPad?

Illustrator for iPad has a simplified vectorize feature. It handles clean logos fine; for anything nuanced, use desktop.

No Illustrator subscription? Five other ways to vectorize. Art ready to print? Start a die-cut order →