Your canvas size doesn’t really matter for the purpose of using the Live Trace tool, so you can go ahead and select any default canvas size. Once you have your sketch the way you want it in Photoshop, open up Adobe Illustrator and create a new document. Step 3: Copy your sketch from Photoshop and paste into Illustrator. Ideally you want a good balance between those two so you retain as much of your sketch as possible. Then, as you move the left slider toward the middle, it will make the darks even darker. I typically do that as much as possible until I start to lose some of my hand lettered sketch (you can see in the image below that it begins to look grainy if you move your levels too far to the left). As you move the right slider toward the middle, you’ll see all the whites within your image get whiter and brighter. Here we’re going to adjust the sliders to lighten our lights and darken our darks even further.

To access the Levels panel, go to Image > Adjustments and select Levels. The way that we’re going to do that is by adjusting something called Levels. We want to change that! We want it to be as white as possible to provide contrast with the lettering before we bring it into Illustrator. Now, you can see because my photo was a little dark that my background has now become pretty gray. There are multiple ways to create lettering vectors within Illustrator (including “tracing” over your letters manually using the Pen tool), but I’ve found this is the quickest and most beginner-friendly tool for vectorizing, and I actually love that this tool often retains a bit of the rough, textured character from my sketch. In this tutorial, I’m going to teach you the process of vectorizing a hand lettered sketch using a tool called “Live Trace” within Illustrator. If you know you’re creating your hand lettering for a fixed-size document (let’s say an 8.5'x11' art print, or a 1000x1000px Instagram graphic, going the extra mile to vectorize isn’t absolutely necessarily.

However, you don’t always have to bring a digital sketch into Illustrator to vectorize it. Once my sketch is exactly the way I want it, then I’m able to bring it into Illustrator to vectorize it, which will finalize my design and allow it to become usable at any size. Photoshop can be great for editing my original hand lettered sketch, removing any stray pencil marks, or correcting things like alignment, spacing and proportion.

I like to use both Photoshop and Illustrator in tandem when I’m creating digital files from my lettering, and think it works best that way because each of them has different strengths. So, which of these programs is better for digitizing your lettering, you ask? The answer is… it depends on what you want to use your end product for! You’ll also need access to both Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (and we’ll talk about the difference between the two programs and why each one is crucial to the process.)Ģ) This is what I would consider an intermediate lesson, so if you're just starting out and you’re not sure what a digital file even is or you’re a little bit intimidated by programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, maybe bookmark this article and come back to it once you have a more solid foundation of the basics of hand lettering! I highly recommend creating your lettering in black and white for the best possible digital outcome. Before we get started, a few things to keep in mind:ġ) You’ll need a pencil, ink pen, and paper (or whatever your hand-lettering tools of choice are). You can make your hand-lettering into a book cover, t-shirt design, art print - anything you can think of. You can use the steps in this process to turn any of your sketches into digital files, not just for the purposes of a logo.

Vectorize hand lettering