Newbie question about adding a stroke

[BreadSlicer]

Hello All,

While being very familiar with Photoshop CS2 I am a total neophyte with Illustrator CS2 so here's my dilemma:

As you may already know Illustrator does strokes much better than Photoshop so I have imported a PSD file into Illustrator hoping to add a stroke but I find myself thoroughly confused on exactly how to go about doing this!

Any and all advice would be very much appreciated and thanks in advance.

 

[maccrazy]

Bread, without knowing how complex your .psd file is, the short answer is "you can't easily do it." What I mean is, a .psd file is a raster (pixel-based) image, while Illustrator is a vector-based program.

Illustrator CS2 has a feature called "LiveTrace" that basically converts a raster image to a vector image, and for some images it works quite well. But again, without knowing how complex your .psd image is, I can't say if it'll work for you.

If you do use LiveTrace and convert the image to vector, then add a stroke, you can then bring that image back into PS and convert it back to raster. That's much easier than raster-to-vector.

-MC

 

[BreadSlicer]

Wow.

It's actually a pretty complex graphic (a logo design I'm doing for a small business) and when I was playing around with Live Trace it just looked like a mess.

That's good information to know Mac and I appreciate your response.

Thanks again.