20 Pathfinder, Crop & Cutout tips for Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 20 Pathfinder Crop tips a Graphic Design for Lunch class Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, 20 Adobe Illustrator, path, crop, and cutout tips in 20 minutes. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop and Procreate. Today we're looking at 20 pathfinder crop and cutting tips. So you will learn tips for making the most of the pathfinder palette. You'll learn techniques for cropping artwork and images, how to apply pathfinder effects and tricks involving the Knife and Scissors tool as well as much much more. In most cases, the techniques and tips shown in this video will be appropriate for all versions of illustrator but I'll tell you when they're not. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started on our 20 pathfinder crop and cutting tips in 20 minutes or less. 2. First Five Tips: Create a knockout text effect. You can create a knockout text effect using the Pathfinder palette. I have here some text, it's just regular text. It hasn't been converted to outlines, so it's fully editable and above it a red circle. I'll select over the circle and the text, and in the Pathfinder palette, I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key on a Mac as I click the Exclude option here. What we get is this knock-out effect. It's a compound shape here in the Layers palette, so we have our text and we have our ellipse. The color of this entire effect is applied via the compound shape. If I select the compound shape, then I can change the color of this effect. It's see-through, so if I turn on my background here, I just have a rectangle at the background, you can see that it's see-through. I can move this circle or the text and this is a live effect so it's going to change wherever this circle is placed relative to the text underneath. Pathfinder and Pathfinder Effects. You're no doubt familiar with the Pathfinder palette that you can see here on the right of the screen. But did you know that there are also Pathfinder Effects here? Effect Pathfinder, Add is the same as unite, Intersect and Exclude are both options on the top row of the Pathfinder palette, and Subtract is the same as minus front. But these tools work a little bit differently. I've got two shapes here. I'm going to select them and try and apply one of these Pathfinder Effects. We can't do that because we're asked to apply the effect to groups layers or type objects. I've got a group here, so let's apply the effect using this group. This time we can apply and add effect, intersect, exclude and subtract, which is equivalent to minus front. The difference between these effects and the ones that you can apply using the Pathfinder is that these effects are live. So if I go here and select this shape, I can adjust the shape that has this effect applied to it. It's a live editable effect. Create compound shapes from the Pathfinder palette. In the previous tip, you learned how to apply effects using the Pathfinder effect, you can do the same thing from the Pathfinder palette. So let's go and do a minus front on these two shapes. They're just regular shapes, they're not inside a group or anything. I'm going to hold down the Alt key on a PC, the Option key on a Mac, and click the Minus Front option. Here you can see we've created a compound shape. It has two rectangles in it. As we did before, this shape is live, so we've been able to create a Pathfinder effect using the Pathfinder palette, but making sure that we applied the effect holding the Alt or Option key to create this live effect as the result. Controlling shape, overlap colors with Hard Mix and Soft Mix. Two of the Pathfinder Effects that are not reflected in the Pathfinder palette are Hard Mix and Soft Mix. Let's have a look at Hard Mix. I'm going to choose Effect Pathfinder and then Hard Mix. What we're saying is the overlap between these two shapes has a different color. Now you can also use Soft Mix, which will give you a similar but editable effect. I'll choose Effect Pathfinder, and then Soft Mix. With Soft Mix, we can control the mixing rate, so we could change it to, for example, 25 percent, and that will give us a different result. Click "Okay" when you're done. Any of these options can also be edited by opening up the appearance panel and double-clicking the effect that you've applied to that particular series of objects, you can make changes and then click "Okay". Create a live editable see-through text effect. I have a photograph here, locked down at the back of the art board. On top of that I have a partially see-through rectangle of white and then some text on top. I'm going to select the text and the rectangle and group them with object group. Now I'm going to make the text see-through by choosing Effect and then Pathfinder, Subtract. The text is now see-through. If I go here to the last palette, you can see that we have this compound shape. We have the text Barcelona, which is fully editable and a rectangle. The Subtract option has given us text that we can see through to the image behind. 3. Second Five Tips: Create an outline around a piece of text with ADD. I'm going to select this text and apply an offset outline to the entire piece of text. I'll click here to add a new stroke and it's going to be orange color and it will be 10 pixels wide. I'm going to offset it by 10 pixels with effect path, offset path, and I'll just click ''Okay''. You can see where the letters join that the effect is not of an outline around the text rather outline around the individual letters. I'm going to select to my text and now let's go and choose Effect, Pathfinder, Add. Now we get a very different look. Here, we've got a true outline around our text and it's created using the Add Effect. Why the new Illustrator crop tool isn't all it promises to be, there's a new crop tool in Illustrator 2017, the most recent version. When you add an image to a file, you get a option here on the toolbar called crop image. Click on it and you can crop the image. This tool only works with bitmap images so these are the images like photos or sketches that you might scan and import into Illustrator. What's happening here is, unlike in previous versions of Illustrator, the image is actually getting cropped. We've actually discarded all the outside of this image and so we have just this piece of the image in our file. The file is going to be correspondingly smaller so that's the advantage of this tool, but don't mistake this tool for a tool that crops Illustrator artwork. It does not work on vector graphics. Problems with using the Pathfinder crop option. I have an image here and part of the image is outside the art board, but I have a rectangle that I've created that is the size of the artboard, it's a no fill, no stroke rectangle. If I wanted to use it to crop my art board, I can do so but there are problems with this particular process. Notice that these shapes all have strokes around them. When I select everything and go to the Pathfinder option and click the Crop tool, what's going to happen is that everything is going to be cropped to the shape of that top rectangle but I also lose my strokes. You need to be aware that if you use the Pathfinder Crop tool, any strokes on your shapes are going to be lost in the process. Crop with export or a clipping mask. There are a couple of alternatives that you have for cropping an image like this. One is with the rectangle that we had from the previous tip, the no fill, no stroke rectangle. I'm going to select all the objects including the topmost no fill, no stroke rectangle, right-click and choose ''Make Clipping Mask''. That clips the image using the rectangle as the clipping mask. The content is still there, it's just not visible. If I undo that, there's another option that you can use. If you're headed to the web, you can choose File and then Export, save for Web Legacy, provided you click on ''Clip to Artboard'', then the image is going to be clipped to the artboard shape when it's exported as a JPEG, PNG or GIF file. Using divide to cut an object into segments, I have a polygon here at the bottom of the layer and above it are three lines extending well past the edges of the polygon. I can use divide to cut the polygon up into these triangle shapes that are made by the lines. To do so, I'm going to select over everything, the polygon and the lines. From the Pathfinder, I'm going to click ''Divide''. I have a group here that has six objects in it, so if I select the group and ungroup it, you'll see that we now have a series of triangles. The lines have been used to cut the polygon into pieces. You can see the lines themselves had been sacrificed in the process. 4. Third Five Tips: Cutting a shape with the knife tool. The knife tool shares a toolbar position with the eraser and scissors. It's a free-form tool, but it has no editing capability at all. So you can drag a line through a shape and you'll cut the shape in two, but you can't edit the cut because it's already been made. Let me just undo that. One instance where the knife tool might be useful is using Alt or Option with it. In that case, you can draw a straight line with the tool and have exactly the same result. But again, no editing capability with this tool. Cut up an object using Split Into Grid. I have a rectangle selected here. It's filled with a pattern. I'll choose object Path and Split Into Grid. In this way, I can split the object into a series of blocks arranged in columns and rows. So I'm going to add three rows and four columns. I'm going to add a 10 pixel gutter in between each of the blocks that I'm cutting the shape into. If I click Preview, you'll see what the shape is going to look like when it's cut up, and you can also optionally add guidelines. When you click Okay, you now have a series of individual objects that the rectangle has been cut up into. If you cut up a shape that's not a rectangle, you're going to end up with rectangular boxes. The shape is going to be converted to a rectangle as you cut it into this grid. Using the Shape Builder tool as an alternative to the Pathfinder. The Shape Builder tool was introduced in Illustrator CS5, and it can be used to perform all the options from the shape modes. For example, in the Pathfinder palette, I'm going to select over all of these shapes. I have everything selected. I'm going to the Shape Builder tool and I'm going to unite on these shapes. So I'm just going to drag over the two shapes to unite them. Let's have a look at Minus Front, which would involve removing the green elements. Well, I'll hold the Alt key or Option on a Mac as I drag to remove these pieces. Here, let's have a look at intersect where we'll keep this square here and remove these by holding the Alt key or Option on a Mac as we drag over them, and finally, exclude, we'll remove this piece here, holding Alt or Option and just dragging over it to remove it. Use this Scissors tool to cut apart. The Scissors tool shares a toolbar position with the Eraser tool, and it can be used on a path to cut the path at that point. This path here has a brushstroke applied around it, and if I cut the path then the brushstroke is going to be applied in a different way. If I cut the path in a couple of places then we're going to get multiple brushstrokes applied to this shape. Over here, I have a circular path with a series of blended shapes applied to it. But they're not stretching all the way round this circular path. Well, if I go to the scissors tool and cut the path, then the shapes are going to be applied around the path evenly spaced. Create a doughnut shape in three ways. I have a series of red circles on top of some larger orange circles. We're going to look at how we can cut the red circle out of the orange one in three different ways. I'm going to select the Pathfinder and I can use Minus Front that will cut out the red hole from the orange. If I select both shapes and use Exclude, I'm going to get the same result. Instead, this time, the resulting shape takes on the red color of the piece that we removed. We can also select the shapes, right-click, and choose Make Compound Path. In the last pallet, you'll see that we've got three identical compound paths. The only difference being that one of them is colored a little differently to the others. 5. Final Five Tips: Removing a curved line from a circle. I have a black circle here with a white line through it, and the line has just been stroked with white with a large stroke size. What I want to do is I want to end up with two pieces of the black circle with a see-through element in the middle. I can do that by first turning the line into a filled shape. I'm going to choose Object, Path, Outline stroke. Now I'll select this filled object and the circle, and I'll group them with object group. Having grouped them, I can now use the pathfinder effect and I'm going to choose Subtract. That removes the line from the circle, but this is fully editable, so if we don't like where the path is, we can easily move the path, and we still get the same effect. Trimming a shape with divide below or divide. You could trim the ends of this shape using either divide or divide below. Let's look at divide. I'm going to draw a vertical line here, and I'm going to select both the line and my shape, so I have the line and the path selected. I'll go here to divide. Now with my group selection tool, I can select over this end of the shape and remove it. When we use divide, we select both the line and the shape. Divide Below works a little differently. This end, I'm going to, again, create a line, but this time I need to select only the line because it won't work if I choose the shape as well. I'll choose Object, Path, Divide Objects Below. Again, I get a group with this element here separated from the remainder of the group. With the group selection tool, I can just select over the piece I want to remove and remove it. Harness the power of minus front. Here I have a group of circular objects, and at the very back is a black rectangle. If I select all of these objects and click Minus Front, what's going to happen is that Illustrator is going to subtract absolutely everything from the bottom-most object, and so we're going to get holes in our shape. Now it's got nothing to do with the fact that these objects are in a group because I'm going to select them and I'm going to ungroup them. Now I just have a series of objects, but because the black rectangle is at the back, when I select all of these objects and click Minus Front, everything that is in front of the bottom-most object is subtracted from it. Repeat the last pathfinder action. Whenever you've used the pathfinder, for example, I've selected everything here and I'm going to use minus front, you can automatically repeat the last function without actually applying it. I'm going to select over all of these shapes, and on the PC I'll press Control 4, on the Mac that will be Command 4. That immediately repeats the last process that you did using the pathfinder palette. Create a sophisticated overlapping shape effect. I have a series of overlapping circles here, and a photograph underneath. What I want to do is see these white areas, but where the blue is, I want to see all the way through to the photo underneath. Simply turning the fill off isn't going to work because I'm seeing some extra edges to these circles that I don't want to see. I'll reinstate the fill, keep the shapes all selected and go to the pathfinder and click Trim. I've lost my strokes, but all of my shapes are now created the way that they should be. Let's go to the stroke and let's reapply a white stroke. I'll set the stroke weight to about 19 pixels. Now I can go and turn off the fill. I'm going to target the fill and turn it off, and this time we're seeing the effect that we came here looking for. 6. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class is to go to the class project area and just tell me which of these tips you think you're going to use, something that was surprising to you, or something that's going to open up a world of possibilities to you in Illustrator. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learnt lots about Illustrator that you didn't know before. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed and learned something from this class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend the class. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.