Transcript:
Hello. I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video Tutorial today we’re creating white transparent half tones in Illustrator. Now before I start the video. Let me tell you where else you can find my illustrator training. I have a series of courses at Udemy And in the description below a coupon links for all those courses, My coupon prices are always at least as good as anything that udemy can offer and often they’re better. I also have classes at Skillshare and again. A coupon in the description below includes an offer, at least as good as the current Skillshare offer and generally better sign up for Skillshare and you’ll get access to thousands of classes there, including over 200 of mine, so let’s head back to illustrator, and we’re going to start with a brand new document. It doesn’t matter what size your document is. I’m just making mine 1920 by 1080 which is the size of my screen now because we’re going to be creating a white halftone. It’s going to be a bit of a problem seeing things, so let’s start with a rectangle. That is the size of the artboard lets. Fill it with a color. I’m not going to use black because I need to use black to actually create my halftone, so let’s create it in a sort of pink color, and I’m going to align it to the artboard, so I’ll use their line tools. You can get to those by choosing window and then a line. I need to make sure that I’m aligning everything to the artboard and just click horizontal and vertical align Center. Then I’m going to lock this down, so I just need to lock this particular rectangle down, so it doesn’t move. So if flexibility to create our halftone now. I’m going to create a circular halftime, but you could do this with a just linear gradient halftone, and if you’re using illustrator CC 2019 which I haven’t downloaded yet you could do it with one of the more creative gradients that are available in that new version. I’m going to start with a circle here, so I’ll start dragging out the circle. Add the shift key, so I get a perfect circle. I need to fill this. With a gradient, so let’s select the gradient, of course, it’s going to be a radial gradient, and I want it to be reversed. Because I want white on the outside black on the inside, lets. Make it that now so that I have my dots as separate dots. I’m going to double click on the black here and I’m going to bring it down to be a gray. That’s the way that you get separated dots in your halftone, and I’m going to the white here and I’m just going to pull the white back a little bit, so I make sure that I have white at the very edges. So that’s a good start to my halftone now. I’ll go to effect and I’m going to use pixel a to color halftone. I’ve set my maximum radius to 8 We can just test that. See how it looks. All the other channels are identical, and that makes a black and white halftone. If you have your channel’s different values, you’re not going to get a black and white halftone, so I’ll just click OK and let’s see how that looks. Well, it’s looking pretty good for the purposes of this video. So let’s go with that. So what we’ve got here is a path, a circle that has no stroke. It has a fill of a radial gradient. It has a color halftone applied to it, so we need to sort of expand this, but there is a way of doing. This is just to rasterize the whole thing, so let’s choose object and then rasterize. I’m going to set this to a high resolution Color model RGB. I’m going to make a transparent background and I’ll just click OK, and that’s going to turn this into a bitmap, a raster bitmap image and we can now trace that, and the trace options are up here, so let’s click on image trace illustrator goes ahead and traces that we can click the dialog here so that we can have a look and see what the trace options are if you’re going to make adjustments to these options. I suggest you to improve you off So that illustrator doesn’t retrace them every time You make a change in the setting, so I’m going to set my path fitting up to high. I’m gonna set my noise down to low in this case. We want quite a bit of noise because the noise is the outer edges of this trace. So if you remove noise, you’re going to eat away at the edges here. I’m pretty happy with everything else, but I’m going to try and ignore white. That doesn’t always work, but let’s see if we can ignore white and let’s click preview because that is the equivalent of a trace and we’ll wait while illustrator reach this well–why has been ignored. So that’s a good thing so now that we’ve got a trace that I think is pretty good. I’ll close the image trace dialog and I’ll go up here to expand and what that does is it makes it back into vector shapes, so click expand, and now we have all these little vector shapes. We will look in the layer’s panel. We have a group here of individual vector shapes. Run down to the bottom! I always do that just to make sure that there are no no. Phil, no stroke paths at the bottom that you want to get rid of, but everything looks perfect if you have some no. Phil, no stroke paths. And if they’re in this list here, you have to get rid of them because the very next step is to make this white, and if you have them selected and you make them white, then they’re going to be filled with white and they’re not going to look right, so I still have everything selected. Let’s double click on the fill color and let’s go and select white, which, of course is 255 255 255 in the RG and B channels. And this is not quite there And I’m having trouble selecting it, so let’s put it in manually and click. OK, I’ll go to the selection tool. Just click away from the shape. So this is our white halftone. Of course, it’s on a background now. The person who asked me if I could show them how to do that in a video wanted not only a white halftone, but they wanted it to be a PNG image, a ping image and that’s an image that has transparency, so they don’t want this pink, so let’s see what we’re going to do first of all. We’re going to reselect everything, so let me just select over the dots. I’m not worried about this outside pink because it’s going in just a minute, but I want to select my entire halftone image going to the artboard tool. I’ll click on it once, and then I’ll double click on it because I need to set my artboard preset to fit to select it art when I click, OK? The artboard is now resized to be the exact size of my halftone image, and at this point, I can just get rid of my rectangle, Totally remove it now here. Although you can’t see it because it’s white on white is your halftone dots, so we’re going to take this and we’re going to save it as a ping image, which will have transparency in it, we’ll choose file and then export and save for Web legacy. At this point, you can change the size of the image. If you want to because this is a vector, you can enlarge it if you wish. I’m using Ping 24 As my image format. You could use ping eight. I just prefer to use Ping 24 and then we’ll go ahead and click. Save, I’m going to call this dots. It’s a ping image. I’ll click. Save now, we can test this with a brand new document. We can do it in Illustrator. That’s just fine, we’re going to create a brand new document. Let’s add a rectangle to it because we won’t be able to see white on white unless we add something over the current artboard so that we can actually see this thing. Let’s just fill it with black, and I’ll just remove the stroke, just for neatness sake. I’m going to lock this down now. Let’s go and test our ping image. I’ll choose file and then place I’ll navigate to where the image is. It’s actually here, so I’ll click on it. Click place and then just drag to add it to the image now. This is a Bitmap ping image That was what I was asked to create by my viewer, of course. If you want yours in a different format, you can save it in a different format, but this is how you would create a white halftone dot image as a transparent ping here in Illustrator and thank you so much for the question because it was a fun video to create. And I hope that this helps you. The video did help you. Please give it a thumbs up. Click the subscribe button and hit the notification bell. So you’ll be alerted when new videos are released Until next time my name is. Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.