Creating a white layer from existing artwork?

[sixxteenbits]

I'm working on a project that will need to have a color version, and a black and white version too. The white will indicate where a special foil treatment will be applied to the work when printed. 

In the color version, I have mostly vector art, but also some raster pieces of hand-drawn elements. In creating the black and white version, I simply selected the elements I wanted and then copy + pasted them into a new layer. I went to Appearance > Fill and set it all to white. This of course doesn't work for the raster elements, though. I'm trying to figure out a clean way to turn those white as well. 

I tried turning the elements white in Photoshop, then reimporting into Illustrator... but scaling and matching the position on each is a pain. Is there a better way to do this?

[Monika Gause]

Please tell us more about the nature of the raster elements? What kind of files? Color mode?

There might be plugins that do this such as the plugin InkQuest.

[Simmer1]

Hi,

There may be a number of ways this could be done in illustrator, but like Monika Gause 

but we would need more information. Are you able to provide a screenshot also?

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

You could add a fill above the image pixels in the Appearance panel and give the fill a Path > Outline Object Effect.

Tip learned from Teri Pettit.

[sixxteenbits]

Ton - this worked perfectly. Exactly what I needed. Thank you!

[Ton Frederiks]

Good to hear that helped!