which version of illustrator are you using?

illustrator CS...

read the illustrator help for "livetrace"

there's a tool which creates a closed path based on click on a color. it's like the magic wand tool which instead of selecting similar areas of color creates a solid path

Ants?...in photoshop or illustrator? which is the tool named?

called "autotrace" in illustrator. it's to the right of th eyedropper tool, above scissors, and below gradient., be warned, it gives a rounded shape and isn't really suited if you want crisp rectangular objects.

i beleive you can adjust the tolerance on the autotrace command the same way that you adjust the tolerance on the magic wand in photoshop.

once you rasterbate the image, it will not give you the choice of saving it as an illustrator file. type in the name ______.ai and save it. If you do this you wont have to go through the hassle of transferring it.

or, in photoshop you can boost the tolerance, select color range, choose the color range you want, make the selection a path, export paths to illustrator and cleanup.

get on a machine with CS2 and use livetrace

You can save selections in photoshop and save paths to illustrators...thanks fellas

There is a program called Adobe Streamline that specializes in tracing 2d images and vectorizing them with a variety of options and it can, of course, export to illustrator & CAD.

livetrace, autotrace, cool

Supertrace?

You could import a jpeg into Flash, and use the Modify>Trace Bitmap command, set the tolerances, and then export as .ai file or .dxf

ah yes - I forgot that livetrace used to be called autotrace. apologies

couple things - streamline's functionality has been included (and improved on) in illustrator since v10.

streamline, autotrace and livetrace are actually very powerful tools capable of very exacting results, but the controls aren't very intuitive and can take some time to learn fully. I've seen alot of people get frustrated and give up.