Use Photoshop Objects in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Use Photoshop Objects in Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class. Use Adobe Photoshop objects 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 looking at how to use Photoshop objects in Illustrator. You're going to learn how to take pattern swatches from Photoshop to illustrator images, images that have got transparency in them, and also shapes and paths. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others, please, if you're enjoying the class, it would be really great if you could 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. I ask this because recommendations like this help other students to say that this is a class that they too might like. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started taking things from Photoshop to Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Take an Image from Photoshop to Illustrator: The first technique we're going to look at is taking a whole image, a rectangular image from Photoshop into Illustrator. Now, this is a photograph that had a lot of things done to it in Photoshop, and I want to take it to Illustrator so I can use it as a background to a project there. To do this, I need to select everything, so I'm going to choose Select, All and I'm going to choose Edit, Copy, and that just makes a copy of this image to the Windows or the Mac clipboard. I'm going to Illustrator at this point, and I'm going to create a new file, or I could just open the file that I want to put this image in. The width and height of this art board are 1,000 pixels, and I'm using RGB color mode. That's particularly appropriate since I'm bringing in a photographic elements. I'm going to click okay, and all I need to do inside Illustrator is unsurprisingly, choose Edit, Paste. Now this image, when it was in Photoshop, or if we would have a look at it in Photoshop, it's actually a 1,000 pixels wide. I'm choosing Image, Image Size. I'm going to say it's a 1,000 pixels by 724 pixels. It's coming to Illustrator on the face of it looking quite a bit smaller than that. So I'm just going to hold the shift key as I enlarge it. If I enlarge it only as far as the art board itself, then we shouldn't see any significant degradation in quality in this photograph. But it is a bitmap image, and so if we enlarge it, it's going to lose quality. Now let's just go back to Photoshop, and quickly see what would happen if we had, for example, put an adjustment layer over this image. I'm going to choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer. I'm just going to put a simple black and white adjustment layer over the image. Lets just beef up the reds here, because these leaves were very red. Now if we look in the last panel, we've got two layers, and choosing Select, All, it's going to select the data from both of these layers, but when we go to copy our image, we have to do it a little bit differently. We need to choose Edit, and then Copy Merged. That is treating this image then as if it were flattened, so all the data from all the visible layers will be copied. I'm just going to click Copy Merged. Let's swing across to Illustrator. Just going to move this image out of the way, and let's just paste in the one that we've brought this time, Edit, Paste. You can see now that we've got a black and white image, but you do need to use Copy Merged in the situation where you've got multiple layers in your image. You'll still use Select, All, to select it. But Copy Merged, just makes sure that you're copying the merged file. So much for bringing a rectangular image in. All bets are off as soon as we look at an image that has transparency in it, because this is not going to work. We're going to look at that in the next video. 3. Pt 2 - Transparency from Photoshop to Illustrator: We're now going to look at the problem of trying to take transparent images from Photoshop to illustrate it. Because the process that we used earlier just doesn't work, I'm going to show you how it looks. I have a scanned image here, so it's a drawing that I scanned and cleaned up in Photoshop. What I did was I isolated the lines so that there would be transparency behind this image. I've put a white layer here just so that you can see what's going on. But regardless of whether I turn this layer off or discarded entirely, when I select this layer and choose, "Select All", and go ahead and copy and go to Illustrator and paste the image in the same way as we did the other photograph, well, it looks as if this image has pasted incorrectly; when I drag it off the edge of the art board, you can say that it's brought the white background with it. So even if the image has transparency inside Photoshop, whether or not this layer even exists in the image, illustrate is going to add some fill behind it to fill in those transparent pixels like it or not. So this is not a solution we can use. The best solution is to either save this image as a PSD file with the transparency in place. So you want to make sure that all you can see is this transparent image and you can save it as a PSD file. The other thing that you could do is you could save it as a PING file or PNG file. File, save as, and this time I'm going to save it as PING. Now, PING or PNG is a flat file format. So we're going to have just a single layer in this document, even if it had had 50 layers, it would still only have one layer in it. But PING does support transparency, and that's really important. So now I'm going to click "Save" and click "Okay". Now when I go to Illustrator, let's just get rid of the one that was a problem, let's look at how we would get this image into Illustrator, and we can do that one of a couple of ways. I'm going to show you both because they're both interesting to learn and understand. Now the first one is to use File Place. I'm going to choose File and then Place. I'm going to select my diamond PNG image. Now there's an option here for linking. So if you didn't want to embed this image in your Illustrator file, you could link it. The benefit of linking is if you later made a change to this PNG file, then when you open the Illustrator file up next time, the change is going to be reflected in that file. Now, you would probably do that for the situations like where you're bringing in a logo. In case the logo was to change, then the Illustrator files always going to have the most recent copy of the logo. For something like this, there's no need to link it, and what I'm going to do is without link turned on, effectively what I'm going to do is embed this file inside my Illustrator file. So I'm going to click Place. I'm going to drag it off the edge of the art board here because we wanted to prove to ourselves that this time we're bringing in transparency, which is what we are. This PNG image's transparency is being brought into the Illustrator document. So that's one way of doing that. The other way is to open a PSD file in Illustrator, which is clearly interesting. So let's do file and then open, and let's go to our diamond PSD file. If you will remember rightly, it's exactly the same as diamond PNG except it's a PSD or a Photoshop file. So I'm just going to click Open. Now we get Photoshop import options. So these are the options that we're going to get anytime we want to bring a Photoshop file into Illustrator. Show a Preview, lets me see a preview of what I'm bringing in. What I want to do is to convert layers to objects. I don't want to flatten layers to a single image, I don't want to import hidden layers, there aren't any, I just want my layers to be objects, and I'll click Okay. Here is an Illustrator document, which is my diamond PSD file. If I open up the last panel here, you will see that in this layer is just this image here. If I go and select that layer and pull it away, you'll see that the transparency has come with it. So once it's open inside illustrator, we could build another document around it or we can do an edit copy. Go back to our Illustrator document here, let's just get rid of this version, and choose Edit, Paste. Because it came in via opening a PSD file in Illustrator, then the transparency has been maintained. So anytime you want to bring a transparent object from Photoshop into Illustrator, you are going to have to save it. You either save it as a PSD file or save it as a PNG file with its transparency, then either choose File Place and place the file in here, or choose File Open to open the PSD file actually inside Illustrator. 4. Pt 3 - Take a Shape from Photoshop to Illustrator: Now one of the limitations that there is in Illustrator is that, there's no really easy way to save shapes in Illustrator, or Photoshop is not traditionally thought of as being a vector illustration tool. It actually has better tools for saving vector shapes then the illustrator does. Not only does it make sense to learn how to take shapes from Photoshop to Illustrator, but there's also allows you to take advantage of the plethora of free shape collections that are available for Photoshop if you know how to get them from Photoshop to Illustrator than effectively any Photoshop shaped collection can be perceived as being an Illustrator shape collection as well. I'm going to choose File and New and create just a new Photoshop document here. Let's make it 1,000 by 1,000 pixels in size. Now, I recently downloaded installed into Photoshop, a whole heap of crown shapes. They're free. I'm going to give you the download link for them because I think they're wonderful and I used them in my video class on creating glitter in Photoshop. But here are the crowns in here, I've just gone to the custom shape tool in Photoshop and I'm just going to grab one of these crown images, and I'm going to hold Shift as I draw it out into my document, and I've done it as a shape, you can do it as a shape or a path, what you can't do is do it as pixels, needs to be a shape or a path because you need to get access to the underlying path that is creating this shape. This is one of the crown shapes, is not one of the most detailed off them, but it is one of them. Now, that I've added it to my Photoshop document, I'm going through the paths palette. You can see here that it is a path, and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select here The Path Selection Tool, and I'm going to click on my crown, I'm selecting the path that is making this crown, and that would be the same whether I had created this shape as a shape or a path, and I'm going to copy it. Edit, Copy. Now, let's swing across to Illustrator. I'm going to create a brand new document in Illustrator same sizes before 1,000 by 1,000 pixels in size. But since we're talking vectors, it really doesn't matter how big it is, and I'm going to choose Edit and then Paste. Now, I get two choices, Paste as a compound shape, making it fully editable, or a compound path which is faster. Well, we don't need to be really super fast, let's give us a fully editable compound shape and I'll just click "Okay." Here is the path that we had in Photoshop created as a path inside an Illustrator file. Now, the biggest problem you're going to have here is you going to go and deselect it and you're going to be sitting here going well, that was good, but it's all disappeared. It hasn't actually disappeared, it's just given no stroke and no fill when you bring it into Illustrator. In the last pallet, you'll see that you still have your crown path here. You just need to select it and fill it with something. I'm just going to fill it with a color here so that you can see that this in Illustrator is an editable path. When we go to the direct selection tool, we've got all those little points, all these nodes that we're used to seeing inside Illustrator, and they're all fully editable in exactly the same way as any Illustrator path is editable. That's a way of getting access to the wealth of shapes that are available for Photoshop. But take them very quickly and easily to Illustrator, where you're working in a vector environment, and you can actually do something with them. 5. Pt 4 - Export Shapes as an Illustrator File: In the previous video, we saw how we could take a shape from Photoshop to Illustrator, which was fine if you only want to take one shape at the time. But what if you want to take a lot of shapes? What if you want a more permanent solution than just doing a copy and paste every time? Because one of the benefits of Photoshop is that you have this enormous ability to store shapes in Photoshop and they're immediately accessible to you. There's nothing like this in Illustrator. If I wanted to take all these crowns, for example, from Photoshop to Illustrator, I would need to copy and paste every one of them individually unless I used this process. What I've gone and done is I've created five layers, each with a different crown on that layer. I'm going to do a sixth one where we're going to illustrate this. I'm clicking on the customer shape tool. I'm opening up my shapes panel. I'm going and getting one of the crowns that I haven't previously used. I'm clicking away and I'm going to shift click to drag this crown out in its original proportions. Now, I have six layers in this Photoshop image, every one of which has a shape on it, and the shapes just all happened to big crowns. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make all these crowns visible, which is going to just be a big black mass here. I'm going to click the topmost layer and shift click on the bottom-most layer so that all of these layers are selected. Now, I'm going to choose file and then export, and I'm going to choose paths to illustrate. From the paths drop-down list here, I'm going to select all paths, which effectively is selecting all six of these paths and saying to Photoshop, I want you to export these paths in an Illustrator file. I'm just going to click "Okay". Then I'm going to call this crowns. You can see it's going to be an Adobe Illustrator file, is created by Photoshop in the Illustrator format. I'm just going to click "Save". Now, let's go to Illustrator. I,m going to close this one down because I don't need it any longer. We're going to open the Illustrator file we just created, "File", "Open". Here is crowns AI that I just created and I'll click "Open". I'm going to select legacy art board and crop areas and just click "Okay". Again, we have the same situation inside an Illustrator file in that there's a lot going on here, but we're not just seeing exactly what that is. While we're just going through the layers palette, I'm going to open up the layers palette. Each of the paths that I bought from Photoshop is an object in a single layer inside Illustrator. I'm just going to click on one of these objects. I have the fill selected here now. There aren't any colors in the swatches panel because no colors came with the Photoshop file. So I'm going to need to double-click on the fill here and just select a color to use. Let's go get a green color, and there's one of these objects and I can turn it off. I can go and select the next object and fill it with a different color. This would be a handy way of getting access to shapes that you downloaded for Photoshop, putting them in an Illustrator file where they're immediately accessible to you and you can do with them whatever you want to do with them, because they just illustrate a paths now. 6. Pt 5 - Pattern Swatches from Photoshop to Illustrator: The final technique that we're going to look at for taking things from Photoshop to Illustrator is how to take pattern swatches. I'm going to start by creating a brand new file and it does not matter how big this file is because we're going to trash it without doing anything with it. Just create a file. You need to create a file because you need to get access to a dialogue which you can't see unless you've got a file open. I'm going to choose "Edit" and then "Fill", and from the contents drop-down list, I'm going to choose "Pattern". Then I'm going to identify in my pattern collection in Photoshop the pattern swatch that I want to take to Illustrator. When I hover over it, I get a little tooltip, and it will tell me the size of the file, and the size of this one is 668 by 668 pixels. Now your pattern pace could be really big, it could be really small. It doesn't matter, you just need to know how many pixels it is and write that down. I'm going to cancel out of here and I'm going to close this file. Now I'm going to create a brand new file that is the exact size of that pattern pace that I read off out of that fill dialog. I'm going to make this 668 by 668 because that's the pattern pace that I'm going to be using, and I'll click "Okay." Now I'm going to choose "Edit" and "Fill", and I'm going to go and select the pattern pace that are 668 by 668 pixels in size and just click "Okay." I've filled this document with that pattern, and this is exactly the size of the pattern pace. Now you probably know exactly what's going to happen next. We're just going to choose, "Select-All" and "Edit-Copy". Then we're going to Illustrator, and we're going to create a brand new file, it doesn't matter how big it is and we're going to choose "Edit" and then "Paste". This is a Photoshop pattern swatch open in Illustrator. What I can do is I can open up the swatches panel here and drag and drop this pattern into the swatches panel. Since it's now a pattern swatch in Illustrator, I don't actually need it. I'm going to just drag out a rectangle here, I have the fill in the foreground here, I'm going to fill it with my pattern. If I need to resize it, then I can choose "Object-Transform-Scale", and I want to transform the pattern, not the object, so "Transform Patterns" set on "Transform Objects" is turned off. Let's make it 50 percent of its original size, and we'll just click "Okay." We're able to use Photoshop Patterns Swatches in Illustrator. Of course you're going to have the exact same problem with pattern swatches if they have transparency in them as you had with images that have got transparency. Let's quickly go back to Photoshop and have a look at a pattern swatch that has some transparency in it. I'm going to choose "Edit-Fill" and look in my Pattern Swatches. Now, this pattern object here, this pattern swatch is 847 by 988 and it has some transparency. I'm creating a document the size of the pattern swatch, I'll choose "Edit-Fill". I'm going to select the Pattern Swatch, and I'll click "Okay", and it's filling that document perfectly. But we know that if we try and copy and paste this into Illustrator, it's going to be filled in, in the transparent areas and we may not want that to be the case. If we don't want it to be the case, then we're going to need to save this. I'm going to save this as a PNG file. When I'm saving a PNG file, I'm just going to select the default options, which for me are Smallest Slow and no interlacing, I'll click "Okay." Now I'm going to Illustrator, just going to discard this image here. Let's go and place the pattern swatch, so I'm going to choose File and then Place, and I'm going to go and get my trellis pattern. I'm not linking, I am actually going to place it in this file, and I'm just going to drag out my trellis holding Shift as I do to make sure that it is being sized in proportion. Now we can't see the white bits around the edge because the art board itself is white. But you can say that it's bringing white with it. Now that I've got it inside Illustrator and I've got it transparent, I'm just going to drag and drop it into the Swatches panel. I can delete it because I don't need it any longer. Let's go and create a rectangle, and let's now fill it with our pattern swatch. Now, these white areas are really not white, they're transparent. What I can do, as I could do with any pattern-filled shape in Illustrator is open up the Appearance panel. I have the shape selected here is our fill or what I'm going to do is add a second fill. The fill that is at the very back, I'm going to add a color to it, so I'm going to put a second color in behind the first one and that's going to give me this alternating color pattern. The transparency and the pattern can be harnessed to create a whole series of different looks for our pattern because the pattern itself is transparent. Now there is a got you with patterns here in Illustrator, I'm just going to select the path, I'm going to select the shape, and I'm going to click here on "Recolor Artwork" because the only color that we have access to in this artwork is the yellow color, the fill color. We don't have access to any of these pattern colors. A lot of the things that you'll be used to doing with patterns, swatches in Illustrator in terms of re-coloring them, it's just not going to be available to you if you're working with bitmap patterns that you've bought from Photoshop. If you want this pattern to be a different color, then make it a different color before you get out of Photoshop. You are going to want to edit it here in Photoshop, save it as your PNG file or your PSD file, and then bring it into Illustrator the way you want it to look because you just don't have access to the same tools as you would have had, had this Moroccan trellis pattern being designed as vector objects in Illustrator. Just be aware of that. For this reason also, anytime you want to bring in a bitmap image into Illustrator, you're wise to do all the editing to that bitmap in Photoshop first because you just don't have the tools for editing color and stuff like that that you might be used to with vector objects for bitmap images. Of course, the situation will be totally different if you actually want to create a vector object using image trace from your bitmap images, then you'd be able to have access to all your color options because you'd be converting a bitmap into a vector object. Once it's a vector, it's treated a whole lot differently by Illustrator. I hope that that helped you see some of the potential that you have for working between Photoshop and Illustrator with bitmap images, with pattern swatches, and the wonderful opportunities that are available to you with shapes and paths. Your project for this class is really simple, just write in the project area which one of these techniques really spoke to you? Which one do you think you're going to use? If you'd like to experiment with it and have a go at doing a project based on that, do so. But I'm really interested in what's speaking to you because that information can help me look forward for the classes that I'm going to develop over time so that they can be more meaningful to you. Now, as you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're 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 this class. These kind of recommendations are helpful for other students. It helps them to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy taking. Now for my point of view, if you wanted to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments 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.