"grouping" in Illustrator

I don't know what it's called, nor do I know exactly which option I need to chose, but look at the following 2 images, zoomed in at 2400%:

http://www.rdi1.com/personal/illustrator.gif
http://www.rdi1.com/personal/illustrator2.gif

I have a pretty decent-sized 2-color .EPS logo (formerly a Bitmap, converted to .EPS using Flash...don't laugh, I can't trace).

Well there is a bit of complexity in the logo, so I had to turn up the sensitivity when converting it, at which point it came out like the images above. Instead of a few nicely placed points, there are literally 1000s of little chunks, I assume are caused by the TINY color difference that was there when I converted it using Flash, but if I turned down the sensitivity even 1 notch I didn't get the detail that I needed. Anyway, my question is:

Is there a way to join those, and if so, how? Thanks a million.

If you can select them all without too much difficulty, and NOT select anything you don't want you can use the Pathfinder Palette to Unite the pieces into one large object.

Post a JPEG of the full logo...let me have a look at it.

Is that Jesus in your sig?

To join paths in Illustrator....

Just like Utopian mentioned, but I'll give a step by step.

In illustrator, go to "Window" on the top menu options, and select the "pathfinder" floating menu.

Select the paths you want to join together and click the "merge" icon on the pathfinder menu. Its the third icon from the left on the lower portion of the menu.

Now I'm not too sure if this will work with your multiple colored shape areas, but there may be a way around this problem too.

Copy or write down the RGB/CMYK/HSB/hexadecimal value of the color you want the object to be.

Use the magic wand tool on the fringe shapes. clicking only once with the wand will select the entire region of blocks that are the same color. Change their color to the same color as the main area. Repeat until ALL the fringe shapes have been turned into the same color.

Now go back up to the steps I show above and try the pathfinder "merge" trick.

If you have different Stroke and Fill attributes for different objects, "Unite" will apply the attributes of the front-most object to the combined outline of all selected objects.

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OOPS! The labels on the image below are reversed!!! My apologies!!!

Thanks for the help guys, I'll give it a try when I get back to the office on Monday.

And no Deker, he is just a regular 70's hippie guy I found a picture of.

Mattboy. I suggest playing with the vector tools in Photoshop. Mainly the pen tool, the direct selection tool, and the convert point tool. So that you'll figure out how to create lines and then adjust them into curves without the need to use flash tracing.

Thats how I learned vectors. Not hard at all. At most I'd say it would take you a week to get the gist of how its done. Once you do that, Illustrator is a piece of cake. Not to mention that logos look 100% better done as true vectors rather than vectorized raster images.

Yeah, that's the problem with every method of AutoTrace I've ever tried. It creates way too many anchor points and the path(s) is(are) never as accurate as I'd like it(them) to be. After you know how to use the tools, it's always quicker to manually trace a raster object than to clean up the crap that results from AutoTracing.

I'm bringing this thread back up because I haven't had time to get in and play with this logo again. I really don't have the time to try to re-do the entire logo, though I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard since it's only a swoosh and some text, but that would still entail me learning Illustrator, which I don't have an entirely lot of time to do. I'm getting pushed to get this thing finished so my question is:

Is Adobe Streamline worth a damn? If it will convert this thing wham-bam-done, then it's worth the money, I'm just wondering if anyone has had any good/bad experiences with it. Remember, this is a simple 2-color logo, with definite lines, and no gradients.... (well the original logo has gradients, but the final output won't have them)

I use Streamline sometimes, but if i have the time then i always draw the graphic in Illustrator instead. The result in Streamline is never perfect, but if the print size is very small then it dosn't matter that much.

I have heard that Corel has a better tracing function in Painter. Maybe it is worth checking out.