This is probably one of the most common tasks you will have as you begin to work in the industry. Many people trace a half dozen logos per day.
Here we have a nice seemingly clean logo to trace. However, it is prescreened and you will need to get rid of all the gray areas before you can trace it. We've given you a nice clean 800 dpi scan linked above. You will quickly discover that this seemingly innocuous graphic is a real pain in the mouse. After dealing with this one, you will have a much better idea why there has been all of the talk about unpaid time spent cleaning up preprinted graphics.
Your clients will commonly have any no idea that every gray area (printed tint) is broken up into tiny dots. You actually got off easy here, because the scan you will be dealing with is of an 85 line screen which (as you know) is relatively coarse. These dots give the illusion of gray areas, but they are really pure black and pure white in a rigid dot pattern. This dot pattern must be eliminated before we can trace the logo and color it.
As you can see, those seemingly smooth gray shapes are infested with a sea of dots. It's the only way printers and presses can give the illusion of tints to their images without a separate plate with special colored ink for each each tint (which would drive printing costs through the roof - if it were even possible).
In this case, however, you have a good clean scan. It is relatively simple to clean up (though a little tedious). Before you can auto-trace it in Illustrator (using Live Trace), you will have to get rid of the dots in Photoshop and save it as a TIFF. There is no way you can get a clean trace of all those little dots - plus you can see what those dots have done to the edge of the shapes.
Once you have the dots cleaned up, open a new Illustrator document, place the scan into the bottom layer of your Layers Panel and lock it and dim it to 35% gray. Then add a new layer to place your traces into). Then Auto-trace it, adjust the fills, and refill the gray areas with an appropriate gray tint. When you are done, Save the logo as a PDF and email it to your instructor for grading.
