When my bosses are away in business trips the only way they can get a copy of the original artwork is by taking pictures using a crappy camera phone. Its harder and takes longer to complete but its fun at the same time. Below is the process on how I digitize paintings and turn them into vector from low-res pixelated pictures. 

Most of the images I received are angled and leaning away like the picture bellow. Before I turn this into a black and white image I have to correct its perspective. I use the Distort option in the Free Transform tool in Photoshop to fix this.

Sadly I forgot to screen shot the distortion part. Anyways, this is how it looks like after fixing the perspective. It looks very flat and no longer leaning away. 

The detail that I am more interested in preserving are the outlines of the painting. The best and fastest way for me to separate the outlines from the colors is to duplicate the image and set the new layer mode to Hard Mix. The image will end up looking a lot like it was done in MS Paint, but that's good 'cause it'll be easier to select those bold rich black outlines with the Wand tool. 

After that there will always be a mess behind so I have to erase those spots and paint over some details I lost during the early process. I don't bother erasing light colored clutter since Illustrator does a good job at ignoring them when converting raster images to vector.

Its a lot easier to clean pictures in Photoshop first so that I don't have to in Illustrator. Its very time consuming (and annoying) when you have to edit lines using anchor points.

This piece turned out pretty good and I didn't need to tinker with anchor points at all.

After that I create objects using the Pencil tool. I focus on drawing the objects first before coloring. That way I don't have to go back and forth selecting and assigning colors from my color reference; and I end up saving lots of time.

This piece was an easy one and I managed to complete it around 20 mins. Eighty-five percent of that time was spent cleaning in Photoshop but its a lot more productive this way. Before I spent around 3 hours just to finish a piece like this. I'm glad I found a system I can work with and my speed has improved. Do you guys have your own speedier process? Care to share?

Dr Love by Peter Marco