I have stopped using Illustrator to make vectors and now use the Trace Tool in Enfocus Pitstop Pro. It does what I need and is pretty straight forward. Not a ton of controls but it has gotten everything I have needed out the door.

Jeff A Do you happen to know a ”magic button”, such as you mentioned you discovered for Photoshop, also for Illustrators’ Live trace? I would give my right arm and left leg to get the properly functioning good stuff back…

Of course! Adobe giveth and Adobe taketh away. The original live trace tool probably used more resources to create a legitimate "live trace" and the new tool is garbage because they value engineered it to use less "horsepower." Not cool. The same goes for Photoshop. the "Refine Edge" tool was AMAZING and then Adobe removed it and replaced with with "Select and Mask" which was garbage as well. HOWEVER, when I was 15 pages deep into a thread, someone mentioned that if you held down the SHIFT key when clicking "Select and Mask" it would MAGICALLY open the old "Refine Edge" tool (Zelda secret treasure music plays in the background), which it did and my workflow is back to normal now because of it. None of this makes sense and only continues to make our jobs harder when they dumb down their already good tools.

I just updated to CC from CS3, but I find I still have to go to CS3 just to Live Trace my images. I get a much better result than what Image Trace is doing. Please revert back to the Live Trace tool, or give us more options in Image Trace.
I am attaching my Live Trace presets and some examples of an original drawing, the CS3 result and the CC result, which is far inferior. How can a tool that is 13 years old be better than what is in Ai now?

The poor quality of the current Illustrator's image tracing is a constant source of frustration and anxiety among my fellow illustrators. I dread the day when my old Mac kicks the bucket and I lose the image trace superiority of CS5 AI. Must try that Photoshop trick (thanks guys!), maybe it saves my workflow and the signature illustration style me and my wife have depended on for 20+ years.

I just did a comparison. Making a trace in CS5 AI is better (more accurate) than Make Work Path in Photoshop. This really PROVES development needs to go back and take a look at a 7-year-old AI to find out how smart it actually was, compared to the dog-of-a-trace 2019 is now.

I just put a thread in the AI forums about this. 2019 trace is DEPLORABLE, compared to CS5 (which still works but bombs a lot on Mac). For my current project, I'm having to trace in CS5, save the file, then open it in 2019, and copy the trace to a new layer in 2019, in order to get a trace that's reasonably acceptable with finer details. Adobe AI development NEEDS to take a sincere look at what trace in CS5 was doing right, and then bring it forward! -- My suspicion is the so-called "smart" blur, which actually wipes out finer details, isn't all that "smart." You can't turn it off! :-/ In fact, in CS5, there IS a "blur control": Its default is ZERO. (what a concept.) I wasted huge time today, adjusting all the arcane controls in 2019, trying to get detail, and never succeeded. In CS5 the DEFAULTS are not bad! And it has "ignore white," an essential. -- Monika Gause said it's a known issue, and recommended I post here. PLEASE. It NEEDS fixing!

Working on an Image Trace with some reasonable detail and getting some awful results. These illustrations have 7 colors so doing each one with Photoshop — the 'make work path' way will be way slower.

I kid you not. Using Photoshop make a selection - paths - make work path works better than image trace. I just do that now and copy and paste it into illustrator when it's detailed like you've shown.

I agree. I would like more controls over the tracing process as well (Live Trace had a lot more control over the process if I remember right.)

Image Trace creates unusual artifacts when tracing even somewhat complex lineart. The tracing is also always shifted from the original position. This never used to happen using Live Trace, it almost always worked perfectly. I've tried several different settings multiple times, the results are never as good as they used to be in Live Trace. I had to install Illustrator CS4 today just to use Live Trace because the Image Trace results on the latest Illustrator were too messy.