This tutorial is for illustrator, however you will be using Photoshop briefly for it. I will be using Aerosmith’s “Jaded” CD cover to guide you through the simple process.

First I will take out all the background and focus on the chick. Do this carefully or else her outline will come out choppy.

Now select areas with alot of noise, or unnecessary detail. You almost always need to do this to hair. If you want the hair to be multi-shaded, select each shade seperately. Blur it or gaussian blur it until it all looks uniform.

After you’ve finished blurring out all unnessesary details, transfer the image to Illustrator. Click the down arrow on the trace button, and go to Custom Trace.

These are generally the settings I use for a large photograph. For the Jaded cover, there were less Max Colors and a smaller Minimum Area. If it looks too choppy, use a .5 px blur (thats HALF a pixel, not 5 pixels.)

Final Result:

Although it does not look as clean as a hand-drawn vector, you can do this to see if you want to fully vector an image, also for small graphics and logos, it is very useful.

Keywords: Adobe Illustrator, trace, quick vector, vectors, custom trace tool.