Guided tracing brush (Snap to trace), similar to Photoshop’s Content aware image trace
The automatic full image tracing in illustrator often does not create useful results. The set of lines is too busy or doesn't line up with where a human would consider the edges to be.
As an alternative, a brush tool tool that snaps the lines to the underlying image layers would be more helpful. Human input shows the general location of a line, and illustrator can then snap the line to the nearest set of pixels that appears to be an edge, helping make smooth an accurate traces without excess lines.
While it would be a slower process, the creative control plus accuracy would really help me in my practice.
There could be some AI training opportunities here too, with illustrator learning my tracing style over time to produce faster results, or letting me use the style of another artist as a starting point.
Joseph Annino
shared this idea
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Robert
commented
The tool in Photoshop bahaves like this: You hover over a closed path, it gets highlighted, you click on it and get this one path/object - more or less "selective tracing".
Sometimes this is very useful if I dont want a whole image to be traced but only some elements.
The tool in Photoshop already produces a vector path, so it is a vector tool (a tool that I thought to be present in Illustrator already when I found out about this tool). -
Joseph, take a look at this:
http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/48699680
It’s hardly a thing you requested, and it’s in very early stages of development, but perhaps this is something you can use? -
This reminds of the Magnetic Lasso Tool in Photoshop, that does exactly that — traces a line (although not exactly vector) based on the raster image below.
Later they added Content-Aware Tracing Tool to create actual paths, but it tries to create paths instantly, often disjointed are hardly beautiful.
I like the idea, but I doubt the team is going to invest into a semi-automated tools that are very limited in their appliance... I bet they will try to modernize the image tracing algorithms further, and they will always fail :(
Voted!
