Image trace help - ignore white removes all white inside design too

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
March 4, 2024
1 reply
2087 views

Hi - I'm very new to illustrator. I've navigated placing my image (originally procreate) into illustrator, embedding it, and image tracing it with 'ignore white' ticked on to retain the transparency. However, I've come across an issue in that as some parts of my design are white, these are now been 'ignored' too so I now have transparent areas within my design. I don't really wish to have to re-touch up a design with white in and use a different colour? I am confused as to why an image with a totally transparent background yet white in it (it all looked great when i did ctrl-shft-D) defaults to one with a white background if you don't have the ignore white ticked. Any advice appreciated. Thank you.

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

If you don't check Ignore White, you can remove the parts manually after expanding..

Use the Direct Selection tool (A) to select these white parts and delete.

G

Galena22Author

Known Participant

Thankyou. I'll look into that. I've not used it before. I was just surprised that making sure a file had a transparent background seems to do nothing as soon as you image trace.

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

Yes, the lack of maintaining transparency is bad design from Adobe, becaus negative space (transparency) is not the same thing as white. For my use-case, I have a thick white border around a picture and I want to trace the picture with the white border. Problem is, the white border always disappears if I ignore white. The transparency and the white border get traced into a single object. I have found no solution to this other than to darken the original image so that the border is off-white. This is not actually what I want, though. I want the outline to be white, in a specific shape that is not the same shape as a direct stroke around the object would be. This is bad design on Adboe's part. They should have allowed to ignore transparency, rather than converting all transparency to white and merging them on a trace.

But things change. The current version 29.2.1 has a Transparency option in the expanded Advanced section.

Choose Mode > Color and check Transparency.

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