We want a nice clean black and white drawing, built of strokes, since they are easier to edit. You could do an automatic trace using Object>Live Trace>Make, but then you’d need to go back and the adjust settings for the best results. Now choose Object>Live Trace>Tracing Options. Click on your placed image with the selection tool a bounding box will appear around it. You won’t be able to zoom in on the image while working with the Live Trace tool, so you’ll want a good view before you begin. Go ahead and save your Illustrator file as livetrace.ai. Use File>Place and place the file you just saved into the document. Open Illustrator and create a new document. So save the file and proceed to the next step. There may be some light grey lines left over, but the black and white tracing method we’ll use in Illustrator is going to ignore them. Some of the lines fall within the Magenta channel: Change the channel to Magentas and set the lightness to +100 as well. Set the channel to Reds and set the lightness to +100.

Open Hue/Saturation (Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation or ?-U, CTRL-U on PC). You can download this file and work along by right-clicking (or CTRL-clicking with a Macintosh one-button mouse) this link and save the image to your computer. The more detail you have, the more Live Trace will have to work with. Scan in your image at a fairly good quality. This image is nothing special, just a quick and reasonably simple image for demonstration purposes. I work this way because it allows me to sketch roughly, then ink over what worked in the scribbles and (as you’ll see) easily remove the red in Photoshop. I’ve started with a rough sketch with a Col-Erase carmine red pencil, then inked it using Pigma Micron pens.

Adobe illustrator 8 trace image