Question by Tim S: Making black and white vector art in Photoshop or Illustrator?
I have this photo that i want to turn into black and white vector art. I have PS and AI. I’ve seen this tutorial:http://www.melissaclifton.com/tutorial-vector.html, but i don’t want to do it in color just plain black and white. Can anyone direct me to a tutorial to do it in black and white, or explain how?
Best answer:
Answer by John R
Generally speaking, Illustrator is for vector art, but you can start in Photoshop if you are not used to creating vector shapes in Illustrator. Here are two ways you can do it.
Photoshop:
Open the image in Photoshop and covert the Mode to Grayscale
Image>Mode>Grayscale – this part is optional as once you make your vector shapes you can color them as you like with grayscale colors.
Then use the selection tool (lower the tolerance to 5 or 10) to select specific areas of the image. Now make a new layer in the layer pallette. Once you have your selection, switch to, or open the Paths pallete, click the down-arrow at the top right, and select Make Work Path. You can name this path layer something meaningfull as well. Now you can fill your path with a color or gradient to match the image. Make sure to keep all your vector graphics on separate layers so you can delete the image later. If you need to modify your vector graphics, I would recommend doing it in Illustrator. You may want to just create the paths without filling them and export them to Illustrator.
File>Export>Paths to Illustrator.
Illustrator – once you’ve exported your paths into illustrator, you can now work with creating gradients, and altering the shapes by adding/removing points, changing curves with the bezier handles etc.
You can do everything in Illustrator by just importing (placing) the image and making paths on a new layer on top of the image. I find it faster to do that part in Photoshop and then export the paths to Illustrator. JR
Give your answer to this question below!
What people are saying