So I finally decided to suck it up and use Illustrator… seems like if u r good with the pen tool in PS, it serves u fine in AI… but it seems I am missing a little, probably obvious, knowledge on how to use AI effectively.
Using Live Trace, the default settings for say, photo hi res is still nowhere good enough for like a 25inch poster… so I messed with the custom settings, and making the minimum area to like 2px to give it a better quality render… so the Live Trace process works fine, but the when I do the Live Paint, it gives me not enough memory error and crashes. Expand works fine though, but even though I dont know the different, I feel like Live Pain does a better job, I dont know…
I have 3.25GB running with no other programs open, so this sucks. When I hiked it up to 5px, then it worked. I heard this was a problem in CS3 as well. I am not upgrading to Windows 7 and like 8GB of memory just for this.
So bottom line is, when you want to convert a large image to vector with high quality, what do u do? Should I maybe just work small scale (make it like a 10inch image) and then blow it up after, trusting the vectors will maintain the quality?
Thanks!