Transforming the jagged edges of raster images into the smooth curves of vector art isn't hard to do using Adobe Illustrator's Auto Trace feature. But the end result can look simplistic. For more sophisticated images, you'll need additional help from Illustrator's path-editing tools and from your image editing application. Here's what you need to do.

There's a limited range of editing you can do to an image in Adobe Illustrator. Most of the time, raster images are substituted for the clean lines of a vector image or to save file space in an illustration. While many Illustrator users tediously trace over their raster images with the Pen tool, you need not struggle with drawing every point and path yourself. Instead, you can use the Auto Trace tool to trace your images automatically and turn them into fully editable vector paths, as we've done in figure 1. From there, you can harness the path-editing tools of Illustrator to turn your images into something truly unique. View full tutorial