Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to this video tutorial today we’re looking at isolating a object in Illustrator, so this would allow us to, for example, create this object image as a transparent ping file that could be placed on a website. Illustrator may not be the program of choice for doing this. But if you know illustrator, then you certainly can achieve really good results. I’m starting here with a document in this 1920 by 1080 in size. Just be aware that the size of your document is going to impact your final image. So if you want a really big shape, then start with a really big document and obviously a photograph or an image to extract. That is of that size now. I’m using a smaller document, a larger photo. It’s going to be compressed as I bring it in. I’m going to end up with a cupcake. That’s probably about 800 pixels tall. That’s fine for my purposes. Just be aware that you want to make those decisions before you start. I’ll choose file and then place. I’m going to make sure that link is disabled here, and I’m also going to disable show import options. I want to embed my file my photo in my illustrator file. And so I’m not selecting link. I’ll go and select my image, which is a cupcake image and click place now. I can drag out the image into the illustrator file now right now. This is quite a bit smaller than I want it to be and obviously quite a bit smaller too than the original photograph fungus is going to grab it. And I’m going to hold this shift key as I just make it bigger. I want a cupcake. That’s going to fit pretty much inside the artboard here. You can see the artboard. Is that sort of black line Now? If I start moving around in this document, you’ll find that this photograph is going to move. So the best thing to do right now is to lock it down. Go to the layer’s palette. Locate your image. It should read image not linked if it reads linked here. Then you’ve just got a link. So the photograph is not embedded in the illustrator file. That would be a concern if you needed to send it to somebody because it’s not actually inside the file. I’m just going to lock it down now. If you do have linked here instead of image, what you would do is go and select this layer. Let me just go and do that now and show you you’ll select this layer and you’ll go to window and then links. You’ll locate your image, which will be here. It’ll be a link you go to the flyout menu and you would choose embed image. Now it’s going to be at this point because I cannot embed this one. It’s already embedded what you want to do is to embed the one that you’ve got so take the option and bad image here, and then you’ll end up with the same result as I’ve got. Now, I’m walking the mine down, so it won’t move now. I can press ctrl or command 0 to zoom in and what we’re going to do is we’re going to use the pen tool to select around this object, so I’ll go to the pen tool and I want to set it up so that it has a stroke button. No fill, that’s pretty important, and you’ll want a stroke color that you can sort of see. So if you don’t want to use white, for example, just double, click on it and choose a different color. I suggest you choose a color. That’s sort of not in use in the image. So probably a pink would be fine. I’ve got a one-point stroke. It doesn’t matter too much. How big your stroke is, but you want to be able to see it and what you’ll do is you’ll go around the edge of the image with the pen tool, just making a selection, so you want a shape that is going around the edge of your object. Now you can be as accurate as you want. You may not want to be totally accurate, but that’s your decision to make so. I’m just clicking. I’m not doing a lot of clicking and dragging if I was doing a lot of clicking and dragging, I would get some sort of more rounded edges rather than sort of sharp points here as I said, it’s up to you to take on your skill level in Illustrator here and just make the selection that you can now. I’m just going to continue to go around here. I’m going to do this really roughly because I’ve got another one That’s already been created that we can use to talk about finessing this. So let me just do the world’s roughest selection here. You would obviously want to do a much better selection if you need to alter this as. I’ll hold down the Alt key, and that will give you access to the handles. I need to turn this one to go in a different direction. I’m just going to take a little bit from the icing on top here and then just come back around here roughly and finish up over the top of my starting point. You want to do that so that you end up with a single shape? And so we’ve got a path here. That is the shape of our cupcake. I’m just going to flip this stroke and fill, and you’ll see that we’ve got a sort of cupcake shaped path, not the world’s most accurate, but it will serve to show us what we’re going to do next. I’m going to unlock the image underneath, and without moving anything, be really careful to select both the path and the image. And then I’ll go to object clipping mask and make, and this gives me my cut out object. But thankfully, because we’re working in Illustrator, we actually have a clipping group and so inside. This clipping group is a clipping path. That’s the path that we created that sort of drew around the object underneath, and then we have the object. Now we can re lock down that object, and so this would allow us to adjust the clipping path If we wanted to. Now, obviously I would come in and do some work around here, so let’s just zoom in, and I’ll show you the sort of thing I would do go to the direct selection tool, locate that this Anchor Point here and then sort of drag it in. You can round it off by selecting it. And, for example, select convert selected anchor points to smooth, and then you could continue to work on this anchor point or you could drag down and find the next anchor point and change it, so let’s now switch to the image that I have pre-prepared. Let’s have a look at the layers pallet here. We’ve got the same clipping group. We’ve got a clipping path That is the path that I’ve created to go all the way around at the edge of this shape, and there are a couple of things. I want to show you about this. I’m going to lock it down the image underneath, and we’re going to focus on the clipping path. I’m going to zoom in to this side of the cupcake. Here now you might see that. I’ve got a very slight edge here where I’ve got some of the dark background coming through the edge of the cupcake. What we’ll do is go to the lasso tool? And I’m going to allow so just the anchor points in this area of the image. Now these are not selected and these blue ones are selected And so if I switch now to the direct selection tool, I can now press the up and down arrow keys, so I could, for example, just press the down arrow key once, and that will nudge all those selected anchor points in just sort of one pixel. If you like, and so that can be an easy way of sort of knocking off a very slight hint of color that you might have around the edge of a shape. Use the lasso tool to lasso those anchor points. Press the letter. A to get to the direct selection tool and then just nudge the anchor points now. I’m pretty happy with this shape here. If we wanted to reproduce this as a ping image, we will probably want the artboard to be the same size as the cupcake. So I’ll go to the selection tool. I’m going to click here on the clipping group that makes a selection around my clipping path and what I want to do is to size my artboard to match this, so I’ll go to the artboard tool here and double click on it. I’ll go to custom and I’ll select fit to select it. Art, which is at the very top here and click. OK, and that just scales down the artboard to match the size of my object. Now this object here doesn’t have anything behind it. You know that in Illustrator, you’ll get this sort of white background, but it’s not a white fill. It will turn into transparency if we were to save this as a ping image so to save it as a ping image file and then choose export and save for Web legacy up here, you’ve got the options for your save format and you’ll be choosing Ping 24 and then you can set the width and height now. This document itself is very small. This is quite a bit smaller than the one we were working with earlier. I’m just going to save my object out at this size. You can see the transparency around the back of the object. We’re going to choose clip to artboard here so that this is going to be this of our finished image and then we will just click. Save, you’ll select the location for the Finnish document. I’m just going to place it in my working images here. You can give it a file name. I’m going to call it exactly the same name as my original file and then just click. Save the image is then saved as an isolated ping file. If I were to load it up in preview. I’ve got it loaded up here. You’ll see that it is a cutout image and it doesn’t have any background with the file, so that’s a way that you can create image cutouts in Illustrator. Just bring your bitmap image unit at the size that you want at the final image to be create your clipping path, which is just a path created with the pen tool around your object. Make your clipping group scale your artboard to the size of your art, and then you can just export it as a ping image. Now, if you need to come back in here at any stage and edit this, you will also want to save this as an illustrator. Ai file. Because that will give you access to your clipping path. Which, of course you can edit at any time. So if you find that, you’ve lot something off or you don’t have the smooth edges that you want. You can come back in here at any time. Make edits to your clipping path and then just export your image again before we finish up this video may. I introduce you to my illustrator training at Skillshare comm. When you sign up for school share, you get access to thousands of classes there, including over 250 of mine in the description below, is a skill share coupon for you, which is at least as good as the current skill share offer and typically, mine will be better. I also have Illustrator training at Udemy calm and there’s a referral link for each of those courses in the description below, feel free to share those with family and friends. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. I hope you’ve learnt things about illustrator of which you were previously unaware. If you did enjoy the video, please give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and that notification Bell. So you can be alerted when new videos are released until next time my names. Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my youtube-channel.