help! re: ungrouping greyed out image

Question

Hi,I have opened pngs into illustrator with the purpose of recolouring them.I have done this a million times before, selecting the different parts to recolour.  For some reason now I cannot do this.  I am convinced I accidently have some sort of setting on.  Can someone advise?Normally I would use the direct selection tool to do this, making sure the object is ungrouped.  Now the ungrouped option is greyed out.Any ideas anyone?

Monika Gause · Accepted Answer

After tracing expand the trace. The button should be in the control panel: Window > Control

Bill Silbert · Answer

There is no way you could have recolored parts of a png in Illustrator since a png is a raster file and you need a vector file in order to recolor in Illustrator. Jane's suggestion to use Image Trace will make it vector but please be aware that the quality of the trace may not be even close to what your original image looked like.

By the way is it possible that what you've actually recolored in the past were "Smart Objects" that were within a PSD file? If that was the case then those actually were Illustrator vector files that have taken up residence within the PSD. When you make changes to a Smart Object (which you can do by double-clicking on the smart object icon on its layer within the PSD) you are actually brought back to Illustrator to make changes which after you Save and return to the PSD automatically update within the PSD.

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