In these cases, you may not actually want to trace the scan exactly as it appears (using Illustrator CS2's Live Trace feature, covered later in this chapter, might be a better choice for such a task), but rather, you just want the image to act as a reference. To prevent the image from getting in the way of your design, you might want to adjust the opacity of the image. Additionally, you may want to lock the image so that you don't move it accidentally.
Rather than going through the process of adjusting and locking images, Illustrator has a way to manage this process in a more dignified mannerusing a template layer. Once a template layer has been created, the image on that layer automatically becomes locked and the opacity level of the image is set to 50% (Figure 8.5 , left). You can either check the Template option at the bottom of the Place dialog when placing an image to have the image automatically appear on a template layer, or you can double-click any layer and check the Template option (Figure 8.5 , right).
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