I have Illustrator CC 2018 and I have a series of bitmap images saved as *.bpm (I can save as other formats if they would work better) which I need to convert to Vectors but no matter what Trace preset and no matter what settings I tweak within the presets Illustrator keeps changing the image and smooths it out.
I need the image to be converted to SVG exactly as it is so I would be grateful for any suggestions?
It's because the image is too small in pixel dimensions. You mention the image is 300 DPI, but the DPI/PPI has nothing to do with the size or quality of an image. It's not the image resolution, it's the only the output resolution. The true resolution of a raster image is the number of pixels in the image. If you don't understand why, then you need to read The Myth of DPI.
Anyhoo, enough of that. Here's a fix.
Open the raster image in Photoshop
In PS click Image > Image size
Check "resample" and set it to "Nearest Neighbor hard edges", then set the height or width to something like 300 pixels
Copy and paste the image into Illustrator
Run the image trace again, and in the advanced settings for the Image Trace, max out the number of paths and corners.
What I would do is take it into photoshop, change it to grayscale, increase the resolution a few 100 (1200 usually works for me on a 9" x 5"), use the adjustments to crisp up the edges if the increase of resolution made it a little blurry, then take it back into Ai and do the image trace.
