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Lesson Info

How to Vectorize an Image in Adobe Illustrator CC

Hi there in this video, we're going to vectorized things. Take images like this and do cool stuff like this with them and then take cool images of this handsome man. It's me okay and do this kind of stencil thing with me and then do this kind of like three D anthem graphic kind of thing. I think I've said that wrong, but you get the idea. Okay, we're going to turn images into graphics and victim be able to edit them and color them all in adobe illustrator. Let's go and do it now. Alright, so first up we're going to bring in an image. Okay, so jpeg or PNG or a PSD from Photoshop anything will work. Let's go to file and go to place. We're going to start with our exercise files. We'll start with that bike that we had earlier. Okay, so we're gonna bring it in. I'm going to drag it. It's quite a big image. So I'm going to make it this kind of size and whether it's selected with my black arrow, my live trace and that's the magic thing. Okay, is right there, click on live trace now you can pi...

ck one of these, let's just start with three colors and give it a look. Your machine will turn away. The fans will come on and will stress out trying to do it. Give it a sec. I'm filling now. Come on and nearly there. Cool. Huh? Okay, it goes through and kind of victory rises it, Give it that kind of, I don't know han drawn victor look okay. You can go and adjust it and say actually I don't want three colors, I would like six colors and it'll go through and do it, I'll speed this up okay, so it didn't take too long, but um yeah, that's what it looks like in six colors. If you want a bit more control rather than the presets, click on this option here and that will open up this panel and it gives you loads of control, like crazy amount, the exact amount of colors you want, you can go into advanced, like this is not enough, you can go to advance and it gets super nerdy. Okay, and so yeah, I have a play around, it's kind of really up to you what it wants to look like. I'm going to show you a couple of other tricks by kind of doing some black and white stuff now, but one of the things we might want to do is actually going to go back to three colors, so you might want to speed this up again. Now let's say that I like this and I want to use it, maybe change some colors and move it. It's all kind of stuck together, it's kind of like you're halfway through an effect, okay, you can still see it says live trace over here when you're finished, you need to kind of expand that kind of like says, I'm done with that, messing around with that effect and it's going to turn it into victor's that, I can play around with now. Alright. And what I want to do is I'm gonna click off in the background have nothing selected and at the moment it's one big kind of Bryant group and what I'd like to do is I can use my white arrow, click in the background and just click on one little part, you can see I can drag it off. Okay, so I've turned into like, yeah, you've got the little shapes now. Say I want to re color me this color now. I can hold shift and go crazy trying to select them all. So what you can do is you can just pick one color. Go up to select, go the same. I'd like to select everything in this document that has the same color that goes and selects just that color all the way through it and I can go through now and pick something outrageous. Okay, so that's a nice way to kind of get in there with a bit more detail so that is with it selected. There's an option down here called expand. So I like this but I'm going to do something else. I'm going to just drag him to the side there with my black arrow and we're going to draw things said at the beginning there just the black outline plus the color everything. So let's bring in an image. Okay, I'm using my shortcut command shift P or control shift P and there's one of them called. It's got my name. Where am I? I am Daniel Walter Scott. Can't even find myself there. I am there. So use the Daniels Walter Scott one. Okay, so I'm gonna bring it in again. It's another big image. So I'm just going to kind of drag it down. So we're going to run into problems with this one. And so I wanted to go to live trace. That's cool. I want black and white because I want this kind of like stencil look um the trouble with it is that there's a background and it's kind of interfering with everything. Looks kind of cool. Right? I can go and to my options and drag the main one is threshold. Okay, I can drag it lower and higher depending on what you want, you can see kind of get sort of the background, not quite moving this way, it doesn't. I know because I play with it. So I'm gonna say close that and I'm actually going to delete it because what we're gonna do is we're gonna dump the Photoshop because it's a we need to kind of tidy up the background. I'm going to show you a nice quick and dirty way to do that and it works perfect for the stencil quite stencil look. So in Photoshop opened up that same image here. It is and I'm just gonna do a really quick selection now. Yours is might not be great scale yet so you can do that? You might go to adjustments, there's a few ways in Photoshop but adjustments and this one here does a good job, click on black and white and you can play with these settings if you want to or just leave it. Okay. Now to continue on, you need to make sure the background selected and we need to name it. So double click the word background and we're just gonna call it dan anything. Just call it anything. It needs to get that little lock off it. The next thing I want to do is delete the background and I'm just gonna use the quick selection tool. Okay, It's really awesome. And what I do is I click hold and drag you see as I drag it kind of expands and eventually goes, hey, you mean all of this? And it's pretty clever. Okay, and I'm gonna drag over here, I'm just going to drag around the edges. Okay, not over me. You see, it's kind of automatically done a really a good enough selection. Okay, I'd love to go into loads of details. I'm just about to start a Photoshop course if you're keen on that, but for the moment let's just do some basic stuff. I'm gonna zoom in. There's a few things that accidentally got, it's got my ears pretty good, the hair pretty good, let's missed this glasses bit. So I'm gonna hold down the old key okay and watch this If I click over and just drag around here eventually it starts going, Did you mean all this? I'm too worried about my am again, I'd like to spend a lot of time on this, but we're not going to. So where else is there any problems? Just looking down here in the checkered shirt, I'm looking for that. It's a little hard to see the kind of marching ants hold hold and just rub across the shirt here. Don't worry if it's not great, we're doing it for a stencil, remember? Um So where are you going down here, grab all this If you get too much, say you come along here and you go too far out, you're like, oh no, Then let go of all the keys and just paint it back in. Okay? And just work your way around checking, checking basics, there's a little bit across here, so I'm holding down the alt key on a pc or the option counter. Mac. Ok, That'll do. And so what I'd like to do now is just delete the background. I'm going to delete on my keyboard. I know if your Photoshop man or lady that's a bad thing to do, but it's going to work for what we want to do. I'm gonna now save this thing so I'm gonna save it and it's gonna stay as a Photoshop file. I'm going to Put it in my exercise files, I'm gonna leave it here for you in case you want to cheat and just use this one, it's called Daniel Walter Scott three ready to go and that's it. So we just kind of like tidied up the background and made it black and white and it's going to illustrate it. Now, bring in that file, Then you will just got three drag it out Okay, Missing part of my head. It's okay quick selection remember because live Trace is going to be pretty forgiving and I'm going to go to black and white logo now and this is going to give me the effect that I was looking for. I'm going to go to my options and in here I can play around with more or less kind of what am I gonna do? I have no idea, I'm just going to drag it around now and get it to a feeling, you know, something that I want, something looks like me kind of like it where there's like a bit of a pupil going on in there. It's kind of cool. What I might do is I like, I might like to options on different sides of my face because there's a big shadow, I might copy and paste it and kind of combine the two. But for the moment, I like it, remember when you're finished, okay, we're going to click expand okay and now it's kind of broken apart now that might be it. Okay, you might be happy with this kind of stencil look now if you want to continue on with the kind of I can never pronounce or I have to write it down in front of me. I can't even felt it's called megalithic. Probably said that wrong, but it's that kind of three D. Look that's quite popular. I'm going to show you here in google images. So this kind of like, it's a way of, hey, it's been used as a design style, that's why I'm using it, but it's kind of used for three D. Remember these guys three D. Glasses? Okay, this kind of coloring here lads, a bit of a 3D effect. It looks quite cool just used for type or in this case the silhouette to make this work. I'm going to select it with my black arrow. And what I want to do is um group it because it's the main thing is is this box around the outside that it comes with. Okay, and so I want to select on it and delete it. It does nothing except get in the way. Okay, so now it's all individual parts again. So what I'd like to do is select it and group it back together. Okay, and um yeah, so I would like to do only three versions, the black one and the two colors, so I'm going to select it, copy it. And what I'd like to do is I'm gonna use my white arrow, okay, remember clicking it, like we did this one and say I'd like to because what I want to do is fill it with the color, but if I select it all and say actually I want to fill you with that, say magenta. It kind of does something a bit weird. It makes me wear sunglasses. You might like that. But what I want to do is with the white arrow direct selection tool, click off, click on one part and say slicked, same, no color and then this will work better. Okay, so I'm gonna pick this. I am sorry the magenta and it's probably meant to be a red. I'm happy with this magenta for the moment. You might go and find the official colors and I'm going to paste this back in. That's why I copied it. Okay, so I can go back to this one and I want to move them up here and I'm gonna grab my white arrow, select them. Select same fill color and I'll use the the red, that red. Oh no, I'm not to the science part. Okay, science. And then I'm gonna paste another one and I've got all my three options. What I might do is select them all, get them to a line. Uh center for both of them. And then I'm just going to kind of move them a little bit side to side. Cool. So I want, I'm gonna move you that way. I might grab the blue one and move him a little bit that way. That's the kind of thing I was going for And you start at the beginning there maybe the steps are a little bit big. Okay, might zoom in there now but you can totally finish this video because I'm just gonna adjust that a little bit. I want to try and make it look cooler. Seems cool in my head. Maybe I shouldn't use pictures of myself. Might be cooler with a cooler person. Alright now this is useful for lots of things. Also for things, maybe you've done a hand drawing, you want to turn it into a vector. That's really good for that. So just take a photo of it or scan it and then vectorized it. Use live trace. Another good thing is if you've got a logo and you've got some like primitive brand that you're doing work for and they've got this really bad logo, you can print it off. Okay. And victories it and try and sharpen it up. It might be a really old pixelated thing that you want to try and tidy up finally. And so now it is class project time. It's time to use yourself or significant other or your kid. Okay. Anything you like. I'd like you to see if you can make something in a similar sort of vein to this, some sort of stencil looking thing. You don't have to do the where is it, wrote it down and an ecliptic thing. Okay. You can do any sort of style you like, but I'd love to see it again. Okay, in the projects or in the comments, Please show me what you did. I'd like to see it or comment. Give you tips or just high fives. All right. That's it for live trace in adobe illustrator.