The image trace function in recent upgrades has been beyond disappointing. Adobe Streamline and Illustrator version 5.5 were absolutely fantastic for converting hand drawn, black and white cartoon illustrations to vector format for printing etc. As a freelance cartoonist, I’ve been forced to use Inkscape v 1.3.2 a free application off the internet for this feature now because the Illustrator image trace function is pretty much unusable. Any fine details just get ignored, and tracing raster images at ridiculous resolutions (900, 1200dpi) doesn’t work either no matter how much tweaking of the controls. With all the current technology, how could it get so bad? Please fix it, or please bring back Streamline.

Image Trace is a considerable downgrade from Adobe Streamline auto-trracing. Streamline produced higher-quality tracings from higher resolution images, and there used to be features for tweaking the tracing.
Now it's just a generic medium-to-poor quality tracing. Very disappointing.

I’m a full time illustrator and have been using Adobe Illustrator since the launch of CS - so it’s been years :) I LOVE the app, in fact it’s how I make my living as an illustrator and the app features have contributed to my style development and workflow.

Which brings me to the feedback I’d like to give regarding the Image Trace tool. My illustration style is a mixture of hand crafted, grungy texture and flat colour. I achieve this by creating pencil on paper line work, scanning then I image trace in Adobe Illustrator to vectorise. BUT, I try and retain the hand sketched pencil look as much as possible when converting, this is very important to my overall look and style as an illustrator and it’s one of the reasons clients and customers buy from me.

What’s concerning me is over the years the Image Trace results and settings have changed to the point where I’ve struggling to retain the grungy details of my sketches. With each update to Adobe Illustrator, it seems that Image Trace is “smoothing” out the results more and more, despite the settings.

It’s become so “bad” (I say bad because it’s bad for my style of work, but obviously it’s not “bad” if you want a smoother trace) that I’m forced to use an older version of Adobe Illustrator to do all my Image Tracing - I have to run an older OS on my laptop in order to keep CS5 going.

I’ve included results from CS5 tracing and the latest CC version. You’ll notice how Adobe Illustrator has picked up all the lovely grungy details in CS5 tracing and lost a lot in the CC version despite the settings set to the max to pick up the noise and detail.

I’d love the team at Adobe to really consider users who need to trace work of this nature and allow more detail when tracing, like the older versions of Adobe Illustrator did. I’m truly concerned that I will need to change my style and workflow as the tool I use is not what it use to be and the results are just not up to scratch for my style of work.

Would this be something Adobe would consider going forward?

This method and style of illustration is on the increase and many Adobe Illustrator users are looking to make their vectors look more hand drawn. I just thought it was important to let you know from a longtime user that this feature seems to be declining in it’s ability.

Thank you for reading and your consideration.

ADOBE PLEASE. It is imperative to me that you improve the accuracy of image trace to faithfully vectorize intricate line drawings. I know you can do it because it used to work really well, and now it's laughably horrible. Hasn't been acceptable since 2014 at least. PLEASE help us illustrators and designers with this. We need you to help us.

Illustrator's image tracing used to produce perfect quality vector graphics from large and intricate line drawings. As professional illustrators me and my wife are pretty much depended on this feature and are dreading the day our older iMac ceases working (it runs the old illustrator) and we're left with the poor image tracing quality of the current Illustrator. Our career is built around a children's picture book series (20 books so far) and our spreads are loaded with hand drawn line work full of baroque-level amount of detail. Splitting the images to smaller bits for the image tracing to be able to handle the material is too clumsy and shoots our work flow in the leg. It's hard to comprehend why this basic function was reduced to what it is now. Please, please, please mend this! We can't be the only ones longing for this.

Mimic Illustrator 5's abilities. I can't get a tight enough match tracing a raster image using CC to use for making an emboss or foil die