Luis Fernandez to me
show details 1:00 am (11 hours ago)
Chandra,
Here goes an explanation of how I traced your calligraphy so that you can try your own hand at it.
First I resized the scanned image a little. The original is a very large TIFF file that makes my computer crawl for a vitamin supplement. The larger the image you can work with, the better. I had to resize them because my computer is ageing. I scaled them down to 1600px wide in photoshop.
You then open Illustrator, wait, wait some more, and then create a new file (e.g. size A3). Go to the file menu and place the image in the canvas, use the "place..." menu for that.
Select the file you want to place and click in Place.
Now we are going to trace it, we will turn it into vectors. Go to the Object menu and go down to Live Trace, select the "Tracing Options..." menu.
You will then get the tracing options dialog. In which you can tweak the tracing in Illustrator to fit your needs. Check the box that says "Preview" to see the results in real time. I then chose the preset "Detailled Illustration" because that was the one that gave me the best results.
Once you are done with tracing, your vectors will appear on screen as a Live Trace, but you cannot edit them individually, for that you will have to expand the Live Trace into vectors.
Go to the Object > Live Trace menu and select the Expand option.
Now you'll see that Illustrator has created lots of tiny vectors that more or less fit the image you Live Traced.
You now have more or less what you wanted. If you zoom in, however, you'll see that it isn't quite perfect. Not only is the whole charm of hand-made calligraphy completely gone, but some letters are actually quite deformed and would need manual adjustments to look closer to the originals. But I'll leave that to you, it depends on how much of a perfectionist you are to do any furtehr tweaking. In the following screenshot I have highlighted in red the areas that aren't quite right. The Live Trace tool does a reasonable job at converting images to vectors but it is a far cry away from perfection.
Most modern vector drawing programs can do vector tracing. I'm sure you can find equivalent functionalities in Corel Draw or Freehand (I find Freehand much easier to use than any other tool, imo). Illustrator always sucked at it, but version CS2 has made vast improvements to the Live Trace tool and it's now almost usable. Any version prior to CS2 is just a pain for tracing.
And that's it, erm..., yep. :)
Tell me how it works out for you.
Cheers,
Luis.