I'm often asked how to prepare artwork for printing. Typically a designer provides a piece of artwork that looks great on their monitor but is nowhere near suitable for printing.
Below is a very simple logo which I'd want to print as a two-colour job, a black and a brown. It's been supplied as a tiff file in RGB, I don't want to print as a four colour job. The tutorial is done in Corel X4 but the principles are the same for all versions and for Illustrator (Image Trace). The menu positions may have changed between versions. Go to Bitmaps on the top menu and choose Quick Trace (for more complicated artwork Outline Trace can be chosen, it has more options) This converts the raster image to vectors. It is very important to start with a reasonably high resolution image, otherwise the vector outlines become jagged and hard to follow. Rubbish in - Rubbish out applies.
Preparing a TIFF/JPEG Drawing for Screenprinting
Making good positives from poor artwork