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AI Live Paint: Two Vector Paths for One Line? (Scanned Art) 3

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BentoBox

Technical User
Nov 23, 2009
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Another newbie here.

I'm somewhat familiar with Illustrator but do most of my work in Photoshop. Never had this problem with Illustrator after several months of using it to clean up my lines on scanned art work. I have a shaky hand and cannot trace the images I scan so that is out of the question and the main reason I'm having to use Illustrator in the first place.

I need my lines to be 0.25 Stroke in order to avoid bogging down my pictures with heavy line art. I got the image into Live Paint as I always do, selected all of the paths (already merged together) and tried to change the Stroke. About 40% of the vectors changed to 0.25 and the rest stayed bulky - even though they are the same line on the scanned art.
Here's the original:
I decided to gruelingly manipulate each individual vector path that was too large. That's when I saw that Live Paint was creating two different vector paths for the same line. Now I'm just confused. Here's a close up of part of it.
Why is it creating a single Vector Line on some parts and outlining the line with vectors on other parts of the same line? What can I do to avoid it doing that in the future? And is there some other way to get my lines to the right size instead of manually contorting and deleting all these other lines?

Like I said, tracing is not an option for me. My hands are too shaky. Also, I've done about 10 pieces of art this way and never had a problem until now.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've looked everywhere and I can't seem to find anything that works.

Thank you very much.
 
...to begin with "live paint" and "live trace" are not the same thing, you haven't as yet provided what "live trace" settings you are applying?

...i suspect you have a setting that is applying both "fills" and "strokes"...

...try using the "strokes" option instead, and increase the "max stroke weight" value in the live trace settings...

...live trace is a case of experimenting really, sometimes live trace has to use fills to maintain the appearance of the original, and one setting doesn't always work the same on a different image...

...if your art has to be made up of strokes only, then turning off the "fills" option in live trace may leave you with having to modify those areas it won't stroke after you "expand" the trace...

...try the following settings:

mode - black and white
threshold - 128

blur - 0

resample - off

fills - off
strokes - on

max stroke weight - 40
max stroke length - 2

path fitting - 1

min area - 10
corner angle - 10

..if your version of live trace supports it, it is also useful to have "ignore white" turned on too...

andrew



andrew

============
============
 
Thank you SO MUCH!

You were right; it was a Live Trace issue. I saved all the info you gave me in case I ever have the problem again.

You, sir, have made my day.

Thanks!
 
Hello there ~
This solution was perfect for my Live Trace problem of double paths.
However, after I amended my image then converted to Live Paint, the same thing happened. It was fine for doing the live paint however it is not right.
I tried releasing it but still it is the same. I can't find any settings or preferences for Live Paint.
Also, how do I get my single path image back now? I want to further amend it and with all the extra paths it's a bit of a quagmire.
Fanx
 
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