: Transparency is lost in illustrator CS6 when I use image trace. Help! so I'm pretty new to illustrator so sorry if this is obvious - but, I'm having troubles with the transparency of a flower

@Murphy569

An alternative to the answer from Javi, if your source image includes a lot of white, or if it includes a white border, that you don't want to have to rebuild in Illustrator:


Pick a distinctive colour, one that doesn't appear anywhere along the border of your image and is as different as possible from all other colours along the border.
In Photoshop, create a background layer under the image that has the transparency and fill it with this colour.
Export the resulting image as a TIFF file for maximum resolution.
Perform the Image Trace operation (with "Ignore White" unchecked) in Illustrator and Expand the
image (select the traced image and click Expand in the toolbar)
Select the individual objects that make up the background that you
created and delete them.


Using this method you can retain control over the borders of your image and not worry about losing any white sections.

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@Sarah814

What is happening is when you trace your image, Illustrator is making your "transparent background" into "white space". What you need to do is remove this from your trace.

1.Menu > Window > Image Trace

2.A new window will open. This will give you a lot of trace options
you can play with and the one in particular you are looking for is
under the advanced drop down.

3.Check Ignore White Space

You will now have your cutout object. If you are on a Mac use Cmd+Shift+G etc.


Another way to achieve this would be to expand your object and delete it manually. To do this you need to do the following.

1.Menu > Object > Expand - Click ok.

2.Ctl+Shift+G (ungroup) You may need to hit it a few times.

3.You may need to right click on the object and select release clipping mask.

4.Click the white area and delete.

5.Regroup object by selected the whole thing and pressing Ctl+G (Group)

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