Tracing

[Margarett_H@adobeforums.com]

I have scanned and imported a book of hand drawn illustrations to Ai. I've done one page so far by making a template of it, and then manually tracing it onto multiple layers. Of course, along with all the manual tracing, I've also been grouping, un-grouping, creating and eliminating sub layers along the way. If only I didn't have to manually trace everything, I could just get straight to the work I need to do on these illustrations.
Somebody recommended a program that is dedicated to automatically tracing complex imported images to make them usable within the Adobe suite. What is the name of this program?

[lee_vickers@adobeforums.com]

You could try Silhouette:

<http://www.silhouetteonline.com/>

or Adobe's Streamline:

<http://www.adobe.com/products/streamline/main.html>

It really depends on the complexity of the image regarding the results you will get; blocks of colour will yeild the best results, and images with lots of gradients and fine detail may be too much for the program. The programs convert to vector and save as EPS. Silhouette offers a free trial, so experiment.

[adopey@adobeforums.com]

the function you need (bitmap tracing) is built into Macromedia Flash if you happen to have a copy of it lying around