Vector LOGO to print on Shirt, Jackets and lot of merch

[Exciting_force5CAD]

Hello,

I need BIG help with vectors in Illustrator.

I need to send a logo for printing in 2 days... I thought it would be good to do in Photoshop, but printer says that it must to be created from vectors. We will make a patch from it on clothes.
I have the logo ready, but I need to make a vector version. When I go to Illustrator and do automatic vectorization, it is generally good, except for a few details. When I want to edit that detail,  it is still visible on the printout and I don't know what to do... 😕

Can someone please help me?

[Tina_Irvine]

Hi @Exciting_force5CAD,

It seems like you're possibly missing a few spots when cleaning up your vector image...? Do you have pieces of it locked or hidden when editing?

[Exciting_force5CAD]

What do you mean?

[Tina_Irvine · Accepted solution]

@Exciting_force5CAD, 

It looks like you need to do more manual clean-up of vectors. You'll need to use your white selection tool to select areas and adjust and/or delete excess paths. The Pathfinder panel can also come in handy to merge and exclude (etc) for vector image clean-up.

@Bobby Henderson has a great explanation.

[Bobby Henderson · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately automatic pixel-to-vector conversion filters, such as Image Trace in Illustrator, work only so well. The conversion filters are okay for certain "quick and dirty" purposes, but they don't work well at all creating clean, production-quality vector artwork of graphical items like logos.

This isn't really a knock against Adobe Illustrator. Every vector graphics application that has pixel-to-vector conversion filters suffers from the same limitations. If the pixel-based source image that is being traced has really high native resolution the tracing results will be better. But you'll still see little glitches when zooming in tight.

Certain tracing methods will help hide unwanted gaps where slivers of white or other undesired colors end up showing through. Illustrator defaults to the "abutting" setting where adjacent paths are drawn next to each other, effectively cutting through. The "overlapping" setting will stack new paths on top of each other. If you experiment with the enhanced tracing dialog box Illustrator will try to logically group various objects and make it easier to edit the end results.

Ultimately, if the goal is making a clean, precise vector-based re-creation of a logo -one that can be used again and again in various pieces of artwork, there is no substitute for building up a new version manually.