Transcripts
1. Mastering Live Trace in Adobe Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class live trace, Bitmap to Vector in Adobe Illustrator. 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 going to put Image Trace under the microscope, and we're going to look at all the ways that you can use Image Trace to vectorize your art. We're going to use it in a creative way, as well as in a realistic way so that you can make the choice about how you want your vectors to appear from whatever it is that you're using as a starting point. We're also going to have a look at colorizing things. So if you're doing sketches, for example, in black and white, we're going to have a look and see how you can colorize those once you've got them vectorized in Illustrator. Now, 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 would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend this class, and secondly, write even in just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you're seeing the Follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. 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. Now, if you're ready let's get started putting Image Trace under the microscope and getting your images into vectors in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 Clean up your Scans: Now you probably thought when you signed up for this class that it would be all about Illustrater. Well, that's going to be mostly about Illustrater, but we are going to start in Photoshop because if your scanning images that you have inked yourself, you may want to clean them up in Photoshop before you take them into Illustrater. You don't have to, but you can. In this particular video going to have a look at doing that in Photoshop. If you don't have access to Photoshop or if you don't want to use Photoshop, then skip ahead to the next video and we're going to go ahead and do the tracing in Illustrater. But if you do have Photoshop and you want to see how to clean up scans, let's go and do it. The first thing I'm going to do with this scan, it's straight out of my sketchbook at scanned at a high resolution. It's going to the Crop tool and just get rid of anything that I don't need. I'm just going to crop relatively closely around this space. Then I'm going to rotate it. I'll choose Image and then image rotation, and we're going 90 degrees counterclockwise. The things that you'll possibly want to do in Photoshop, I'd get rid of anything that was bad in the sketch books, I've got some elements here. Firstly, I've got a little bit of ink hanging around here. Secondly, I ran my fingers across the ink and I've got a great big smudge here. What I'm going to do is to just clean up the background of this element before I take it into illustrate that, all I'm going to do is get rid of this garbage. So I'm going to unlock the background black. In other versions of Photoshop, simply clicking the lock icon may not relate this as being a background layer. Instead, you'll double-click on the layer and that will relate that. We are going now to the Magic Wand tool. We're going to make a couple of settings here. You're going to set contiguous off because you want to be able to select those elements in here with one click. You're going to set the Tolerance to probably somewhere around about 20-30. Well, that's going to do is set the range of colors that you are about to select. Never have at really low like zero because this is paper texture, so it's going to have lots of colors in it, but they're all going to be fairly close to white. So 30 is a mid-range setting, given that the range here is between 0-255. You choose 255, everything will be selected. You want to be done at the bottom end here. So I'm just going to click once on this document and say what we select, where you can see that most of the white area has been selected here. I'm just going to press delete. That gives me a transparent background. I'm going to press ''Ctrl'' or ''Command D'' to deselect my selection. Let's just add a layer underneath this one. We do that by control or command, clicking on the New Layer icon. White here is my background color. I can fill this layer with white by pressing ''Ctrl'' ''Backspace'' on the PC, Command Delete on the Mac. Now there are stray pixels here that we will want to get rid of. The way that we do that or the way that we highlight them so we can save them is to click here on add a Layer Style and go to stroke. Now you want to select red as your color or something that you can see really clearly like you can see this here, and you want to set the size to a reasonable size and you want the position to be outside. That's really important. The outside a bit, click "Okay". Now you can go around with the Eraser tool. Size so that it will fit over these dots and just click to delete them. With the Eraser tool at all what you want is a round brush, a circular brush, and you want the hardness to be a 100 percent. The reason to that is that you want to be able to see exactly where the brush is going to paint because this is an eraser. We want to see exactly what we're about to erase. If you don't do that it's going to be really hard to see where the eraser is working and you run the risk of damaging your lines as you do that. What you'll do is you go through and [inaudible] spot this image. You're just going to delete everywhere you see these dots. Just be really careful of the ones that are very close to your line work because you don't want to lose your line work in this process, but you do want to get rid of garbage that's going to mess up your trace later on. It's a bit of cleaning up to do in there. I think I'm going to shrink my brush a little bit and I'm going to click here once and then just shift click because these things are in a line. Click and then Shift click. The eraser works like every other brush and you can paint in a straight line and sometimes that'll help you get rid of mess. I know this mess in around here because that's where we had the smudge from my finger. I'm going ahead and just clean up this scan and we'll come back when I've done that. A few things to note: If you make a mistake, press ''Ctrl Alt Z'' to undo it and go back and start again. I'm able to move my art board around by holding this spacebar as I move it. Then as soon as I let go the spacebar, the tool setting goes back to the Eraser tools up. That just makes it easy to move around your document without having to continually switch tools. To resize the brush, I'm using the open and close square bracket keys, the open square bracket key, will make your brush smaller and the close square bracket key will make it larger. Again, just handy techniques to know when you're working around a document like this. Once you've cleaned up the document, you can go to the stroke here and just drag and drop it onto the trash can because you don't want the stroke. All you needed it for was to identify stray pixels. This image is now cleaned up and so we can take it direct to Illustrater, whether we take it with or without, it's quite background doesn't really matter because we know that this background is pure white because we made it pure white. At this point you would save this as a TIF file. You could save it as a PING file with transparency, or you could save it as a really high-quality JPEG. You want to keep it as higher quality JPEG as you can before you do your trace. We are now ready having cleaned up at this image to go and do a trace in Illustrater.
3. Pt 2 Trace inked text: We're back in Illustrator now, so let's go and trace the text that we just cleaned up in Photoshop. I'll click Create New and just create a brand new document, doesn't matter too much what size it is. I am working in RGB color mode. We need to import the image, so I'll choose file and then place. I'll go and select the cleaned up text click a place and then just drag to add it to my document. Now whenever you bring in a bitmap image, whether it be a Ping or a JPEG or in this case it's a Tiff. The first thing illustrators going to do is recognize that it's a bitmap and say, wait a minute, do you want to trace this? If you don't have the art selected, you're not going to say the trace options here, but if you do have your art selected, then you will see image traces on option. I'll go ahead and click Image trace. I'm being warned that tracing might proceed slowly because it's the large image, so that's fine. It's not actually that large, I'll click okay. An Illustrator has done an initial traits, not a particularly good one, but it is a starting point. For us to fix the trace we can go to the image trace panel, there's an icon for it here, you can also get to that by choosing Window and then Image trace. This panel has some advanced options and you will want to be able to save the advanced options. You will also want to have your art selected so that you can apply the changes to the selected art. Now in the advanced area, you've got two options here, one for paths and one for corners. Basically, what happens is if you got them set to a low value, going to have less paths, less corners. Things are going to be less accurate if you like, if you set high values, then you're going to have more paths, more corners, and more accuracy to whatever it is that you're trying to scan. Here, we probably want things to be on a slightly less accurate cycles. We don't want to see all the lumps and bumps in the initial drawing. I'm going to set paths to a low value and I'm also going to set corners to a low value. Notice that whenever I make a change to a setting in this panel, Illustrator will go and catch up, it will go and retrace the image to show me what the result is going to be. That's because I've got preview turned on. If you have a very large image and lots to do in this panel, you can turn Preview off and then go and make your changes, and then turn preview on. What I'm doing here is I'm making a change to the noise level, and what noise is, is small pixels. At a low value where saying to Illustrator, ignore things that are very small, like between one and 10 pixels in size, but everything else count that as being a something. But if we want this up to a high value we're saying that you should ignore everything less than this and only count on large areas. We can get some smoothing this way as well. Typically, when you take paths and corners in one direction and they will go generally together in a single direction, either too low or too high. Then you'll take noise in the exact opposite direction. Here paths and corners are low, so that means that noise is probably going to want to be high. But right now we're not seeing the result of setting noise to high because we haven't seen Illustrator catch up. Let's turn preview on and let's see what happens. Well, thickens things up a little bit. It also removes some of these areas in the actual letter forms that weren't pure black. We're actually seeing them close up. We may want to take an even higher value for noise here to clean up more of them. Just want to be aware of the impact that each one of these settings is going to have on your trace. When you start closing up these areas that might be at the cost of something else, just be aware of the places that you need to look. The setting we haven't talked about is threshold. Threshold is where a pixel is determined to be black or white, sort of the transition point, if you like. Right now we have 128, it's the middle gray. The thresholds go from zero or one at one end to 255 or 256 at the other end. Somewhere between there is going to be your transition point because we are going for a black and white trace, every pixel has to be determined to be either black or white. Right now it's 128, but we can get good value with this particular image by increasing the threshold value. Saying to Illustrator, if you see a lightish gray here, why don't you call that black as well. We're going to get a little bit more smoothing and picking up some of the additional thickness in these letter forms because some of these pixels might have been light or mid gray and now they're being called black. Will be able to push the threshold value for this particular scan a whole lot higher than we normally would be able to do so because we know that the background is white, because we made it white in Photoshop, it's pure white. The transition point for things becoming black is very narrow, we've got only a little bit of data around these letter forms. They are not sort of gray pixels in the background being paper texture or anything like that. This is a somewhat unusual circumstance in that we can push the threshold really high and still not lose our image. Of course, if you go too high, if you go to the very end, 255 will turn everything black. But if we drop it back, a couple of pixels, we should be in the region of things actually being black and white. You won't see this in a typical photograph for example, if you just photograph this text and brought it straight into Illustrator, you wouldn't be able to push it anywhere near this high. For us to use this threshold value, the background has to be pure white and we know it is because we made it that way. As soon as you've got a trace that you like and you may want to just adjust these values a little bit until you get the trace that you want. But as soon as you've got it, you can go ahead and click Expand. Expand is going to set the thing concrete. What it's going to do is convert a bitmap image into vectors. You can say Image trace is no longer available because this is not a bitmap image. Right now, it is vectors, if we go to the last panel and just reset my workspace there, let's go to the Layers panel and say what we've got. Well, we've got a group and in that group are a series of paths. Now these paths are just white and they're going to be the internal letter form, the area inside this L and this L and this O here and this Y here are going to be all of these elements because these are white and because we didn't tell Illustrator to ignore white, we getting those. I actually don't want them in this because we're scanning text, I don't need those white areas for what I'm about to do with this. I'm just going to select them and drop them onto the trash can and that's got rid of all of them except this one at the back, and the one at the very bottom is always going to be the surroundings to the image. Here we had a surrounding area of white. We can get rid of that too. That leaves us with three elements. We've got a compound path for the heart here because it's got a hole in the middle. We've got the letter M because it's not attached to anything else, and we've got all the rest of this, the O-L-L-Y as a single compound paths because they're all joined up letters. Now we can do things because there is a vector. I can go and grab the heart and just nudge it across into a slightly better position just above the letter y. I can go and smooth things out. I could, for example, select the letter M, and if I wanted to smooth it, I could use this Smooth tool. I could just come over these lines and just smooth them out using the Smooth tool and get a better result. Particularly if I saw that there were lumpy or bumpy areas that I wanted to smooth out. You can also use the simplify path options. I'm going to select just the O-L-L-Y here and we can use object path simplify. With Preview turned on we can see that the original comprises 246 points. The settings I've got here you may not have in your dialogue, you can just adjust them to suit. But what you're going to be doing here is increasing the curve precision or adjusting the curve precision and the angle threshold to get less points. Less points, a smoother result. But you don't want to lose too much of your trace in doing so. You may want to be a little bit circumspect as to where you put the settings and use a fairly high value for curve precision, just to save most of the trace here. If you're happy with what you see, you can just click okay. Then of course it's possible to come in and just make adjustments to individual anchor points. I can see a bump here, going to zoom into this area. I'm going to the direct selection tool and there is an anchor point here, while I can tell is an anchor point here, because it's really obvious from the look of this shape that there's an anchor point here. While having selected that anchor point, I can now adjust it and try and get a smoother transition at this point. Get the handles a little bit more in alignment, which will give me a smoother point here and less of that intense bump. You could come in here and add anchor points, you can remove anchor points and you can adjust the anchor points, of course, to do that, you will want the direct selection tool. I'm just going to thicken this up a little bit. Just about to lose this bit in here though. You just get this handle. It is possible to adjust the shapes just exactly the same way as you would adjust any path that you had drawn in Illustrator. Now you're done, this is now a vector shape and you can do with it whatever you would do with a regular vector shape. Let's go and select the heart and will be able to re-color it by just selecting an alternative color. Let's make that a little bit redder. We can adjust the color or the positioning or the size of these elements. These are our first trace completed, we've looked at the basics. From here on in, we're going to look at specific tracing scenarios to see how we would get the best results for whatever it is that we're trying to trace.
4. Pt 3 Trace and color your art: The next piece of art we're going to look at, "Tracing". Is something that has been scanned straight out of a notebook. There's a lot of garbage here, as well as the art that we want to actually work on. In Illustrator say we now have the ability to crop an image. I'm going to crop away the bits that I don't want first of all, I'll click on crop image, I'll drag in on the edges here. I want to crop this fairly close to the image itself. I don't want a lot of excess here, particularly because the excess is going to be paper texture and I want as little of that as I can possibly have. Once I've adjusted the crop rectangle to encompass my entire image but not too much extra, I'll click apply. I can size this up a little bit further. I want to do that by holding the Shift key and sizing up the corners because I don't want to lose the proportion of this sketch. This is an inked image as we saw it's straight out of a sketchbook, we can assume that some of the paper texture here is not white, it's going to be a light gray. Let's see how it's going to trace. We'll go back and click Image trace. Then we'll get the image trace panel here so I'll click it to open it. With the image selected I can now make some adjustments and because I want this to be a creative piece, I'm going to treat it pretty much the same way as we treated that text earlier. I am going low on my path and low on my corners. I'll go high on noise. Then I'll adjust threshold but this time we won't be able to push it really really high because there will be paper texture there. But it does seem like I can get it, relatively close to 255, but just not all the way there. I'm looking at the result of the trace and just making sure that I'm getting a thicker lines as I can possibly get because for this image, the thick lines are going to be way more interesting. Let's push the noise up and see if we can even take that up a bit higher. In the last scan you saw that we got a lot of white in the scan, we could choose to ignore white here. I'm not going to, because if I want to color these elements, I'd like the white areas to be easily selectable, particularly on a simple piece of art like this. Soon as I'm happy with my scan, I'll go here and click, Expand. We're going to see pretty much similar things here in the last pallet, as we saw with the other image. Will go straight to the bottom of the group because at the bottom of the group is going to be the white surrounds and we don't need that, so we're just going to select that alone and delete it. We may also want to adjust the rotation of this. It's not a 100 percent straight. At this point I'm going to grab everything and just rotate it so it's a little bit straighter. With this line art pace, we're going to go ahead and color it. What we'll do first of all is take everything out of this group. With the groups like this, they'll choose, Object and then Ungroup. We know these are going to be white areas. We know these are the black areas. I'm going to select one black area. It doesn't matter which one I select. We know these are black because we made a black and white trace, so everything has to be either black or white. It can't be anything other than those two colors. If I go up here, I can click to select similar objects, similar objects by Fill color, and that will select all the black object. Let me just show you another way of doing that, a way that you're perhaps a little bit more familiar with. Just grabbing I shape that's colored black, you can go to select and then same and go to Fill color but this option up here is also selectable and sometimes it's just a bit quicker to use that. Now I have all the black objects selected. We can say black as the Fill color. I can go ahead and choose a different color. I want a really dark gray color, but not black. Let's go for this color here. We're back into gray rather than black. Now I'm going to select some of the white areas and this one in particular, which is the top of the ice cream. Let's just apply a color to that and then apply a color to the ice cream itself and then to the inside of the ice cream stick. I'm going to select these remaining white pieces, there are only three of them I can select one and click here to select all three. All three will now be selected even though they're very very small, that will do the selection for me. I'm going to sample this color and then I'm going to make it a little bit live. I still have them selected. I'm still in that orangey color, but I'm going to choose a lighter color to use. Not really happy with this brown. Let's just go and find something a bit better for that. We now have our trace piece of art. We've gone from line work into a black and white trace, and now we've been able to color it. Some of you will be familiar with the technique I'm about to show you, if you'd like the image the way it is right now you're done and dusted. Let's have a look at a slightly different way of approaching this. Let's go and select a black or gray things again. I've got all the gray things selected. Let's go to select and let's choose inverse because this allows me to invert my selection. Instead of having just the dark gray thing selected, what I'm going to do is deselect the dark gray and select absolutely everything else. Let's go to inverse. Just a quick way of selecting multiple colors without having to do all the work yourself. What I'm going to do here is I'm just going to move this. I'm going to nudge them with the arrow k's and just move them a little bit off register. This is a really cool effect and some people really like it. You can push them a little bit further if you want to take individual elements and just move them to select them and move them. This off register effect can be attractive for giving your art a little bit more of an organic feel. You may want to move the colors behind the black though. In particular, these colors here, if we move them behind the black or gray area, then we're still going to say the line work. We've got this composite here, which is the main part of the ice cream. I'm going to move that above all the colors as well, so that we retain the black or dark gray lines but also have this sort of off register effect with the color elements. There's a way of approaching a simple line art piece, tracing it and then coloring it and perhaps with that off register effect if you like that.
5. Pt 4 Trace Type to make Paths: Before we start with this next concept, I want to show you what we're aiming for because that'll make it a little bit easier to understand. What I've got here is the word hello and it's got a brush applied to it. I'm going to show you how you can get this effect in Illustrator using type with image tray. I'm just going to delete that and let me just go to the brushes panel and delete the two brushes that I have here. We're starting virtually from scratch and we'll step through this together. I'll start with the type tool. I've got a font called 5th grade cursive, which is the font I use there. I'll just type the word "hello" and I don't want this to be very big at all. The smaller it is, the better it's going to trace. Now we can't apply a brush to a font to type in illustrated, that doesn't work. We could go and create this as outline, so we could do type and then create outline. When we apply a brush tool, we're going to get a brush around the outside edge of each letter and around the inside edge of each letter. What we want is just a single brush line. We want to turn this into path not filled shapes. We can do that using image trays. We're going to start with a sort of reasonable size pace of type here not terribly big. You don't want it to be big, the results won't be as good as if they are small. We need to run image trace on this, but right now illustrate won't do that because this is vector type. We can turn it into a bitmap and we know that illustrator will trace bitmaps. With our type selectable choose object and then rasterize. This will allow us to convert type into a bitmap into an image like a photograph. So for resolution, we're going to choose this medium. We don't need high resolution here. We're not aiming for a really good conversion. I want it to have a transparent background and I'll just "Click" Okay. This is now a bitmap image and when it's converted to a bitmap image, you'll see image trace appears. I'll "Click" it to trace this. Now this is a pretty good trace if what we wanted was filled shapes, but we don't, we want lines. Let's go through the image trace panel and we'll Select from the presets the Line Art trace, because that's going to get us most of the way to where we want to be, line art preset here, "Select" strokes, so we're not creating filled checks, these are just lines. We might be able to improve on this by adjusting paths and corners to a low value. Now this is going to trace up really quickly because it's such a low quality scan or such a low quality bitmaps. I'm just going to see if I can get anything better with this adjustment. This is also a time where probably that rule of thumb of taking noise in the opposite direction to pass in corners may or may not work. I think it generally works better with noise at a low value, and sometimes I get really bad results with noise at a high value. In this instance it's really not affecting the trace at all but be aware of that, not necessarily in this case there's noise going in the opposite direction. You can adjust the threshold, see if that improves this at all, but I'm pretty happy with this as a really good trace. It's a very small word, but we know that once we've got it into vector paths, we can resize it. I'm just going to go with that. I'm going to close that dialogue and let's "Click" expand. Now we have paths, I'm just going to "Hold" the Shift key as I drag it out. Now the only thing I might want to clean up is this letter h here. I'll go to the group selection tool because we know that this path is going to be inside a group. I'm just going to select over it and I'll go to the pencil tool. I'm going to pick up this line about here, and I'm going to take it out here. Then I'll pick this one up here and just re-work it. Now you're going to see different results. Every time I have traced this, I've ended up with a different result. The overall line work has been different, where the lines appear is different. Every single time you trace this with different sizes or different settings, you're going to get slightly different point at where your lines are. I think I also just want to straighten this up a little bit, so let me go and grab this, and let's go to the smooth tool and let's just smooth that out a little bit. I'm pretty happy with that. Let's go and apply our Confetti brush. You don't want to be too careful with this because we're just going to apply a brush tool, so don't worry about that. The fact that this is a single line here is actually going to help us because if it was a double line, we'd have a sort of mess of confetti happening here. Don't worry that the trace looks perhaps a little bit unusual. It's going to work just fine with this brush. Let's go to brushes panel. Let's go find out confetti brush, "Click" the flyout menu, open brush library, decorative, decorative scatter. Here is the confetti brush as soon as you click it, it's added to the brushes panel. Close down your decorative scatter brushes. Let's go and select everything, so just select over all of our paths, you can see the paths because they are stroked, they're not filled shapes. Let's "Click" to apply our confetti brush. Now, the confetti brush doesn't look as good here as it did in the original, the one I showed you we were aiming for. Well, our problem is with the brush settings. Let's "Double-Click" on the brush with our brush applied to our shapes and see if we can do a little bit better. Well the individual brushstrokes are sort of all lined up relative to the page and that's this rotation. If we change that to path, then they're going to rotate around the path and they look a whole lot better immediately. Be aware of that simple setting like this can make your brushes, particularly scatter brushes look a lot better. I'm going to reduce the size a little bit down to about 75 percent, and with that, I'm going to reduce the spacing a little bit to just close it up a bit. You can see here we're not getting a huge mishmash of applications of the confetti brush around the areas where these paths are overlapping, and certainly if we had multiple paths here, we might get a sort of slightly undesirable result, but let me just kick this up a little bit and I'll "Click" okay. As soon as you make changes to a brush, you are going to be prompted to apply those to the strokes where they are currently applied and of course that's what we came here to do. I'll "Click" apply to strokes and I'll just "Click" out of the way. Here we have the word hello, which has a confetti brush applied to it. It's hello in confetti. We did this by creating the type in Illustrator, knowing full well that we couldn't successfully apply a scatter brush to type, but if we turn the type into a bitmap, then we can trace it. We can use the line art trace to trace paths rather than filled shapes. When we have paths, we can apply a scatter brush or any other brush to those paths. Now there are lots of creative opportunities for doing this. You might find a neon font, for example, and turn a neon font into individual paths that you could then apply some sort of neon effect too. I'm sure you are going to find heaps of ways to utilize this scenario. Now, of course you could have used the pen tool to create those letterforms yourself, but a lot of people don't like the pen tool. I think it also helps to know that you can convert any vectors into a bitmap to try some in Illustrator. You are able to get creative results that perhaps you weren't aware are able to be achieved.
6. Pt 5 Photo realistic trace: In this next live trace example, we're going to look at how you can trace to get a photo realistic result. In this instance, I've downloaded an image from unsplash.com. I've already opened a new document in Illustrator and I've just placed the photograph in it. This is quite a large high resolution image. We will go ahead and start our image traits knowing that that's not going to be anywhere near what we want. Of course it just becomes a black and white trace and this is nothing like what we're hoping to end up with. So go to the image trace panel, I'm going to turn preview off because I have by now a fair idea as to the settings that I want to use and so we're going to set everything up before we get it to trace it, because it's going to take quite a while to trace. From the mode drop-down list, I'm going to select Color and right now it's set to a limited palette, I'm going to set it to a full-time palette and that's going to give me a full tonal range of tones in this image. I'm going to adjust my paths and corners and noise as well because I want a higher fit, a better fit to my paths and I want less of the noise to be discarded. I've got these settings, they're looking pretty good, now I'll click preview and wait while the trace takes place because this will take a little time. Now we have the resulting trace and the image hasn't really changed very much at all because we've done a colorful tone palette trace. We shouldn't be seeing much difference at all, and so I'll go ahead and expand this just noting that I've got over 16 thousand individual paths here and 1.3 million plus anchor points and it's got in excess of 54 thousand colors. I'll click, expand. When I click away from the image, I now have my trace completed. Let's have a look in the last pallet and this is going to look just a little bit scary for this particular image because everything obviously is in a group. Inside this group are thousands upon thousands of [inaudible]. Image has now been vectorized so we could enlarge it to billboard size and it's going to retain the look that it has right now. Anytime that you need a photo realistic result and this isn't going to be very often. You probably won't need it very often, but if you do need a photorealistic result then this is how you do it. If your machine grinds to a halt or if you using in particular an older computer, I would first re-start the computer and I would close down any application that I was not using that will allow illustrator the full amount of memory and processing power of your computer to do this trace, because as you can see it has quite an overheat in terms of what you're asking your computer and indeed illustrator to do.
7. Pt 6 Trace to a limited color palette: I have another image here that I've downloaded from on Splash.com and in this case, I want to show you how you can trace an image with a limited color palette. So again, I'll select the image and click the image trace option. We'll go to the image trace options panel. I'm going to turn preview off at this stage. I'll choose color and I'm going to choose a limited color palette. So this color slider here allows me to select how many colors I want in my image. I only want a few, so I'm going to dial it down to about 9 or ten, something like that. Now again, because I'm going to be flattening some of the colors in the image and getting something with less detail. I want to reinforce that with the kind of scan options I'm choosing here. So I'm going to take paths and corners to a sort of mid to slightly lower value. I'll bring those up a little bit and let's click preview and see what we've got. This time we've got a color palette that is quite subdued. A lot of the brighter colors have been thrown from this image, and we're left with a lot of creams and greens. A really interesting effect for this image. But now I'm going to expand this because I like that sort of color selection. Now if we want to see the colors that we actually got, I can select over the image and go to the swatches panel. In the swatches panel, I'll click here on new color group and click okay. These are the colors that we got from that image. That is also a nice way of extracting a small color palette from a photo. If you trace it to a limited color palette and then grab those colors, you've got a really nice set of colors that look really good together. Now it's also possible for us to re-color the image, of course, using these colors. I'm going to select the image and go to the re-color dialogue. If I go to edit and make sure that all the colors are locked down, I can now start dragging on the colors and just move them into a different area in the color wheel. So you can see we can get some really interesting results from this image and that's just done using a limited color palette and everything there was done in illustrate. We didn't go to photoshop to get that effect.
8. Pt 7 Trace to a custom color palette: In addition to scanning in full color and with limited color palettes for example, you can also scan to a color palette of your choice, which would allow you to change the color of an image entirely. Let's see how that will be done. I've already created a document here in Illustrator. I've placed my image again, one that I've downloaded from unsplash.com. Before we go any further, let's go and find a color palette to use. I'm just going to the swatch libraries here, and I'll select here on the nature ones and then select for example, flowers. Now this gives me access to a whole heap of color palettes. I'm just going to keep them open for now, that's all I need to do. I'll click here on image trace to start the image tracing process, and of course we get this black and white trace, so let's go again to the image trace options dialogue. Before I set the options I want to use again, I'll turn preview off because that will allow me to work in this dialogue without it continually tracing every time I make a change. I want to trace to color. I want to trace obviously to a limited palette because I want to use one of these flower palette. But for this I'll need to select down here, Flowers, because this palate is open, it's going to be available from the palette drop-down list here. Then if I select Colors, I get access to all of these color palettes that are available within the flowers file. Let's select one of them. I'll click here on violet. Now for this particular trace, I don't want it to be very high quality, so I'm going to move all of these sliders into about the middle. That means low-quality paths and less corners, and some of my noise is going to be ignored. Now let's click, ''Preview''. An Illustrator has now traced my object using these colors to color it. If you want to try out a different palette and perhaps look for something a little better as a result, you can do so just choose a different palette and then you'll see things a little differently. Now you might notice that this particular trace has a lot more detail in it than the one we did previously. This violet trace tends to lack detail. The reason for this is that the colors here are a little bit too close together in terms of brightness. The more distance you have between your colors, the more you're going to get a better tonal range in the final result. I'm just going to click here on Expand, and I just want to show you a image that I have created to give you an example of how this live trace with a limited color palette will work. I've taken part of that same image that we were working with just then, and I've brought them in here and traced them. You can see here, that when I go from light to dark and when I go from dark to light and trace, there really is no difference at all in the tracing results. It doesn't really matter what order your palette is in, you're going to get the same result when you do your trace. These are pretty much the same. So two, it will be if you mix your palette up here, I've got light and medium and dark, and again, the trace is pretty much the same. Here I've got three tones of blue that are all pretty close together and the result is that they have been mapped from light to dark in a similar way that's happened up here, but it's obviously a little bit less easy to see the detail in the image. If you want to work with a limited color palette, generally it's best to have more range in the tones and the colors that you're using for your trace. Here we have a paella color blue, I actually lightened that quite a bit. I chose a yellow and then a darker blue. Here the trace is actually different. You can see that the way the colors have been mapped in this one and the way that they've been mapped here between inside the darker blue in the mid blue, and here the darker blue and the yellow, the trace is different. There's a lot more yellow through here and so the blue is actually picking up some detail that we lost in this particular trace. It can pay to experiment with the colors that you're using for your trace and of course, this is all going to depend a bit too on the image and what's in the image that you are actually tracing. Here I tried a couple of other examples with some mix of colors. I just changed this yellow in this instance. I still got the same light blue and the same dark blue, but this time I upped the yellow into a darker orange just to say what would happen there. Again, I've lost some of the detail between the orange and the blue. You can see here between the yellow and the blue, there's much more detail in the strawberry, so this was a better set of colors to use, for example. Down here, I've got two dark colors that are pretty much the same tone. They're both really dark and I've lost all the detail pretty much in my cupcakes. If you're doing traces like this when you want to work to a limited color palette, be aware that having some difference between the colors in terms of their comparative lightness or darkness will help and obviously, the images that you're working with is going to have an impact as well.
9. Pt 8 Prepare a color image for a creative trace: For our final trace, we're going to look at some options for preparing an image in Photoshop before you do the trace. We're also going to do the trace in Illustrator. But if you have access to Photoshop, you can do some things that would be more difficult to do in Illustrator. For this particular image, I'm going to unlock the background layer and I'm going to isolate this pattern. So I'll go to a tool like the "Quick Selection Tool", and just drag over the puffin and I want to select him or her and not the background. So with the quick select tool, you can just drag over the areas that you want to select and Photoshop does a pretty good job. You may want to zoom in a little bit just to check around the edges and if Photoshop has missed out, then you can just drag over small areas to include them. If you need to exclude something because Photoshop has included something that is not part of the bird in this selection, then you will hold the Alt or Option key as you drag on the quick select tool over the area that you want to remove from the selection. I've pretty much got everything I need here. It's certainly nothing excess selected. I just need to make sure that I've got the tip of the beak here. So everything's looking pretty good. So I've made a selection of the bird itself. I want to remove the background, so I'll choose, select, and then inverse, which will give me the background selected, and if I press "Delete", it will just be deleted. To turn off the matching ends here, I will go to select and deselect. In addition to being able to make a cut out in Photoshop, you may also want to do some color correction. For example, if you wanted the beak and the eyes to be more orange before you leave Photoshop, you can do that. I'm going to do this with an adjustment lab because I don't want to recolor other areas of the bird. So I'll choose layer and a new adjustment layer and I'll choose vibrant, because that's a really good option if it's available in your version of Photoshop, for increasing the color saturation of individual colors. What I'm going to do is kick up the vibrance quite a lot to try and get some orange in here, and also kick up saturation a bit. We can see that what that's done is it's brought a lot of blue into the bird. I don't want that to be the final adjustment I make. Here. I've got a layer mask associated with this Vibrance and Saturation adjustment. So what I'll do is, I'll fill it with black. You can do that quite simply by making back your foreground color. Go to the paint bucket tool here, with your mask selected just dump black paint into it. T hat effectively removes the adjustment entirely. So now I'll go to my brush tool, I've got a soft circular brush selected here. I'm going to adjust the size of it using the open and closed square brackets provided that painting white. I can just paint over the areas that I want to apply that vibrance and saturation adjustment tool, and that will leave the rest of the puffin the color it was originally. I'm not getting blue through the white feathers. So that's another kind of fix that's pretty easy to do in Photoshop, not so easy to do in Illustrator. Photoshop really is the better tool for this. Once I've done that, I will actually just flatten this. So I'll right-click this layer and choose merge down. Don't want to flatten the image, I just want to merge down because I'd like to keep this background transparent if I can. There are other things that you can do and they include, for example, applying a filter to this image. There are a couple of filters that I kind of like for this, particularly when I'm looking for a more creative result, less photo-realistic, more creative. One of the filters is what's called a median filter. For this I'll go to "Filter", and then "Noise" and "Medium". This allows me to flatten some of the color in the image. What it does is it sort of minimizes the colors and run things into each other, so you get less detail. Of course, if you're looking for a less photo-realistic result, less detail, it's going to advantage you. Here we're sort of flattening the color in the puffin and we're getting something that's more looking at the shapes that go to make up the puffin and less at the fine detail if you like. So you may want to use this median filter. I find it a really handy filter to know about in Photoshop. The other thing that you may want to do, is to go and apply what's called a cut-out filter. Let's have a look at that filter and you can get to it through the filter gallery. It's up here in the artistic filters. Now my image is pretty big, so I'm going to press "Control" or "Command 0", just so I can see it. This is the cut-out filter being applied to the image. What's happening right now is I'm losing that orange in the beak because of the number of colors that I'm trying to limit this to. You can see that the number of levels is hitting me a little bit. So possibly not the best tool to use for this particular image, or if I do choose to use it, then later on I may want to change these colors back to orange, for example, in Illustrator. But you can see that you're getting a lot more simplicity in this shape, which may be the kind of look that you're looking for. Once you get to Illustrator, you're going to have some very simple shapes that are going to be traced by Illustrator. So you may want to select a sort of increased edge simplicity, for example, to try and soften these edges. You're going to get a very different result than a photo-realistic result. You can get all sorts of things happening here in this filter. But as I said, we've lost the color in the beak, which we would have to get back later on in Illustrator. Let's go with this, let's just click "Okay". So this is my puffin image. At this stage, I would probably re-size it. There's no point in trying to scan an enormous image when you've already lost all the detail in it anyway. We'll probably size this down to much smaller. I'll choose image, image size. You can see that's 5,500 pixels, that's enormous. It doesn't have to be anywhere near this size. I've got percent as my setting here, so I'm going to take it down to about 30 percent. That's going to give me still a really large image, 1600 by 1100. We'll just click "Okay". Now I'll probably just crop it because I've got a lot of excess image here because I took out the background. So let's just neaten that up. So now I can go ahead and save it. For this one, because I've got these really distinct shapes, I don't want any fluffing of it. I don't want any compression on this image. I want these shapes to be as crisp as they are now. PNG is an obvious solution, so I'll choose "File" and then "Save As", and from the drop-down list here, I'm going to choose "PNG" as my format. Let's just call it puffin isolated and I'll click "Save". A large file size is just fine, there's no problem with that at all. I'll click "Okay". So now let's go to Illustrator and open the puffin image up, ready for tracing in Illustrator.
10. Pt 9 Creative trace for a photo: I'm back here in Illustrator with a brand new document, and this is my PNG image brought into Illustrator. You can see it's got a white background that's going to happen when you import PNG images into Illustrator. But it's going to be easy for us to isolate and remove that white because it is the only white in the image. These areas are quite a different color. I'll select the image and click on "Image Trace" and then I'll go to the tracing panel. You can see already that the work that we did in simplifying the image in Photoshop could also be harnessed for a black and white because we're starting to see the shapes that are reminiscent of a puffin, but without all that excess detail. But here we're going for color, so I'm going to select "Color", and obviously, I want a limited color trace. Let's just stop that in a minute when we see our first trace example. Well, it's looking pretty good, but let's just go and say what else we can do. We're obviously not really concerned about our paths being very detailed, so we can bring those values down really low. I'm going to set my noise up to really large and just see what the result is that I get because I don't want small areas of details. That's possibly removed some of the smaller areas of detail and we can get this green back to orange in just a minute. If you're happy with that scan, you're ready to go and let's expand it. We're going to get rid of the white really easily. We'll choose "Object", "Ungroup", because I want to ungroup everything and now, if I just click in here, I should be able to pick up the white and remove it. That's gone now. It's all disappeared. I can't select it because it's already been removed. Let's go to this area here and let's shift click on this area as well. Well, you can see that this is bleeding into the neck of the puffin. If we don't want to recolor everything, let's see what we would do at this point. I'm going to zoom in to where that join is, where the green is going from the back of the puffin into the neck of the puffin. Just going to target this one shape here, and I'll just go to a tool like the Knife tool. Knife is a tool to use for this. I'm just going to drag through this shape and that will cut it in two. I've got a piece over here and a piece over here, and this is the piece I want to color the orange. With it selected, I'll just go to the Eyedropper Tool and let's borrow that orange color. Then let's go to this piece here, again, the Eyedropper Tool and let's sample that orange color. We've been able to buyback and recolor the beak of the puffin to the orange that we expect it to be, even though it came into Illustrator as green. We recognized that it was a nice easy shape and that was what we wanted more with the shapes in a trace and the color can come later.
11. Pt 9 Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to do a trace, one or more traces yourself. Show me the starting image, and then show me your final trace. You might choose to do something photorealistic. You might choose to do something in grayscale or in color with a limited color palette, whatever you like. I hope that you've enjoyed this class, and I really hope that you've learned things about Illustrator and particularly Live Trace of which you were previously unaware. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and if you learned things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend it, and secondly, write, even in just a few words, 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're still seeing the follow link on the screen, then click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. 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, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
