Help with cutting out an image please!

[Rachel37852966e0i8]

Hi, I am a complete technophobe and am using Illustrator for the first time. I am attempting to cut out an image of a leaf that I have scanned in in order to remove the background. I have successfully made a clipping mask and now have the leaf but am struggling to find a way to cut out the gaps in between parts of the leaf so that the background doesn't show. When I make another clipping mask the leaf disappears and the 'gaps' remain. When I use the pathfinder tool and 'minus front', the whole leaf remains and it brings back the other leaves that I originally scanned in. Any help would be appreciated, I don't know anyone who uses Illustrator to ask. Thanks!

[Doug A Roberts]

Can you show what you have?

Though you can probably do what you want in Illustrator, if all you are doing is editing a raster image, you will almost certainly be better off using Photoshop. If you have some further goal that requires Illustrator, please describe.

[Jacob Bugge · Accepted solution]

Rachel,

As I (mis)understand it, you have a leaf with an outer continuous boundary and some inner boundaries to gaps where the background shows through, and you have created boundary paths that follow all the boundaries.

If that is the case, you can simply:

1) Make sure that the outer continuous boundary path is beneath/behind all the others (you can move it to the bottom of the stacking order just above the image in the expanded Layers palette, or you can select both/all the inner boundary paths and hold Ctrl/Cmd while you press X tehn F then X then F to bring them to the front);

2) Select all the bounding paths and apply Pathfinder>Minus front (Subtract from shape area) to turn the whole set of bondary paths into one Compound Path;

3) Select the Compound Path from 2) and the image and make the clipping set/mask from that.