hi welcome to figma friday number eight if you've ever used the traced feature within illustrator to create vector graphics out of raster images then you're really going to love what i'm going to show you in this video tutorial so to get started you'll need to navigate over to the figma community and find the image tracer plugin i'll post a link to this in the video description what this plugin does is it takes a any raster image preferably something that appears to be a flat silhouette or illustration and it converts the raster image into a vector graphic which you can then export to use on print or different types of media and which i'll show you in a moment it's created by dave williams and i suggest that you check out his profile in the figma community because he has a lot of really other handy plugins like the simulator and lorem ipsum plugins that are used frequently but go ahead and get the image tracer plug-in installed and now we need to find an illustration or illustration to bring into figma so i just searched google for a thumbs up illustration i really like this image here i may want to use it on a t-shirt or something some other type of media so i'll just copy the image from here and make sure that you are using images that you have rights to that i'm just showing you this as an example so i'm going to paste that raster graphic into figma and what i mean by raster graphics so if i zoom in here you can see all the pixels here so this image is very low quality and if you scale it up the graphic begins to distort because it is made up of pixels with this image selected i will launch my image tracer plug-in here's that right there uh so this plug-in now scans the selected raster image and creates vector lines uh where it thinks uh they belong throughout the graphic what i can do is i can show these uh additional options here and i can adjust the threshold which is uh like the quality of the the vector output so i can set the threshold to something like uh 5 which doesn't really do anything because it needs to be a little bit greater okay so now we're beginning to see some vectors in there uh i'll change it to let's say 150 so that we pick up more of the okay so now we're getting more of the vector lines and shapes in here uh there's a few other settings in here for smoothing the vector art uh and adjusting the curvature and all that you can fade the original image back and get a better preview of the vector output um so feel free to mess with all of that but i will hit uh place traced vector and now what i can do is so this is my raster image i can just delete that let's first set it aside this is the vector output that we generated using the plugin so now as i'm zooming in here you can see that it's now no longer pixelated because it's not raster and now the vector lines can be scaled to any size and that will they will always maintain that very high quality so now uh once we've sized our vector illustration to whatever size we would like with it selected i will hit export i will select svg i also have the option to export as a pdf sigma shows me the vector preview of the illustration i will hit export image save it to my downloads uh image one trace yeah that's fine okay and then if i navigate to my uh downloads here open that up okay here's my uh svg illustration all in vector scalable to any size let's try one more time and export to a pdf traced image trace let's see pdf boom and let's get that pdf opened up in adobe reader there it is right here again scalable to any size while maintaining that very high resolution because it is a vector graphic so i hope you found that helpful feel free to leave a comment in this video if you have any questions about this functionality or if you'd like to see me cover any other figma related topics in future videos but for now thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one peace