Issues creating a vector using "Create Object mosaic"

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
March 13, 2023
3 replies
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Hello community 🙂

I am trying to turn a PNG into a Vector file in Illustrator so I can edit the colors precisely, and I am having some issues.

The original image is a cellular automata, so it is pixelated by nature. "Image Trace" didn't do a good job of precisely tracing the image, so I used the "Create Object Mosaic" function. This worked really well but it took hours and hours to compute the file. Then once the file was converted to a vector, it was extremely slow to do anything, like zooming in or selecting colors.

Is there a better way to do this? My goal is to have this file be a vector so I can easily edit the individual colors and export the file at varying sizes without the image getting blurry.

Thanks!

Here is a close-up of the image. The actual image is much bigger.

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Correct answer Ton Frederiks

Hi ChloeBO, I cannot do it anymore as simple as I described it.

I first have to convert to grayscale, convert back to RGB, Posterize and convert to Indexed color.

Kurt Gold

Adobe Expert

Illustrator's Object Mosaic is a pretty old filter that has to analyze and process/combine each single pixel of the source image. Depending on dimensions and actual ppi that may just take a very long time.

What you can try is to first decrease the ppi with the Object menu > Rasterize command. Or you may first split the big raster image into several smaller ones, use Object Mosaic and combine the vector squares later.