quick way to trace a photo in Illustrator for lines

[ShuckyD]

I thought I remember a few years back when I was in one of my design classes and we were using Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, but I thought it was Illustrator. What the prof went over was a way to auto-trace an image, with the line tool or something. Where as we could quickly edit and color configure pictures that we either made or took (digital camera).. Im looking for that functionality in either program now, i have CS2 installed on my computer and i cant seem to find it..

Anyone know what im talking about or have a suggestion on how to do this. I have a picture here I took of a plane on a pretty plain background (the sky) and im looking for a quick way to trace it so I can "cartoonize" it pretty easily

[The Real Bingo]

How about Magic Eraser? If the background is all pretty much the same color, you can remove a lot of it all at once, just leaving the object in the foreground...

Before
After

If the colors are fairly close, you may have to fiddle with the Tolerance up at the top.

[ShuckyD]

well i also want to have the functionality in Illustrator to warp the lines a bit, so i can "animate" it as i please

[ShuckyD]

bump

[CujoRbd]

If you are trying to convert raster-based image data (shapes or lines or whatever) to vector data for scalability and customization, you are wanting the "Live Trace" function in Illustrator. You should look it up in the Help, as the settings you should use will vary based on what's in the original image.

in Photoshop, there are 2 tools that come to mind based on your description. You could be talking about the Magnetic lasso tool, which will create a selection along lines of high-contrast such as around a person or something.
Once a selection is created, you can then manipulate and such as you may desire. You could even create work paths based on the selection and then export these to Illustrator. OR, you could create your selection and then press Shift+CTRL+J (or choose the 'Layer->New Layer via Cut' menu option) and then apply a cartoony filter in Photoshop or whatever since it'll be on a different layer than the rest of the image. You could also just take this extracted image (the plane or whatever) and then place this in Illustrator to live trace and then manipulate in IL.

the other tool in Photoshop that comes to mind is the Magic wand... same deal as the magnetic selection in the sense that it relies on distinct lines of contrast to determine the boundaries of the selection. (You may need to adjust the tolerance from 32, perhaps up or down, to get everything selected.) You could use this to Shift select the entire sky, then invert the selection to do whatever with the plane from there.

i'm not an illustrator guy too much, so if you find that you are using Photoshop for what you're wanting to do, lemme know and I may be able to advise a specific course of action

[ShuckyD]

thanks live trace is what rings a bell... i'l have to try that out