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!

How much scratch disk space do you have and how much are you allowing AI to use? It may not be actual RAM that's the problem. 2px tolerance on a really big image is really tight and requires a ton of points.

Vectors DO maintain their quality at any size, that's why vector is the preferred format for logos and large works.

I'm not sure what I had before, but I left it at default, so I guess I had no scratch disk. Now I have it set to my C:, which is my fastest drive (300GB Velociraptor)... but I dont see anywhere a setting for how much, like in PS where I can set a percentage or whatever. Am I missing something? The second poster I made I actually did at 50% of the real print size, and that PDF was good enough they said, so I think from now on I will try to first work with smaller image sizes, and then also forget about live tracing imported images... seems like the quality is good enough just to "Place" the image in from PS.