Combine Same Color Objects

Question

This question has probably been asked, but I can't find it, exactly. I'm a bit of a noob, and am unclear on some of the terminology.

How do you combine all adjoining objects of the same color, all in one fell swoop? This is different from "Grouping" them, is it not?

Perhaps some explanation is in order. I did a Live Trace of an image that had been printed slightly off register. I changed the color of all these small, off-register objects to match the background, so that they "disappeared." It seems to me that it would be a good idea to combine all these very small objects into the one, large, background object, to reduce the complexity of the image.

Answer 1

In Illustrator you can select all, then click the Merge button on the Pathfinder Panel. This will cause all objects of the same color, which touch each other, to combine into one object.

Answer 2

I trust you are talking about Illustrator here...

The way I would do it is select the entire traced image, then click the divide tool, then click ungroup, then select the colour you want to lose and select same fill colour, then delete.

Once this is done you can combine all the existing background.

Hope this helps.