Transcript:
[MUSIC] This is Nick with logosbyniccom. And in this tutorial, I’ll be demonstrating how you can create vector tracings of images using Adobe Illustrator. First, I’ll be demonstrating how you can create a simple monotone tracing of an image. Then I’ll be demonstrating how you can create a color vector tracing of an image as well, but before we get started, if you’d like to sharpen your logo design skills, be sure to check out my logo design academy, it’s an 18 part video series where I outline my entire creative process for coming up with logo ideas from start to finish. I’ll have a link in the description of the video. If you want to check that out so to get us started here as you can see, I have illustrator opened and I’ve imported the image I’d like to work with. If you don’t know how to import your image, just go to file and click on place and it will prompt you to choose an image to place into your document as you see that I’ve done here now. The first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to make a simple monotone tracing of this image right here, but as you can see, this image has color, so in order to get a more accurate tracing what I’m going to do is I’m going to take this image and I’m going to first Open it up with illustrator. I mean, I’m sorry. I’m going to open it up with Photoshop, and I’m going to remove the saturation and increase the contrast between the dark and the light areas so that we get a more accurate tracing now. I do want to mention that. This part is entirely optional. If you don’t feel like opening it up with illustrator, I mean, with Photoshop. You don’t have to, so you can skip this step if you’d like to, but I want to get a really accurate tracing, so I’m going to go ahead and do that. Okay, so as you can see, I’ve opened up my image with Photoshop. The first thing I want to do is click on adjustments over here and I’m going to look for hue saturation, which is right here and I’m going to take the saturation and I’m going to bring that all the way down, and that’s what we’re going for right there. We want to make this a black and white or grayscale image. Now what I’ll do is ill. Come back over to adjustments, and I’m going to click on curves and what I’m going to do with the curves is I’m going to increase the the the contrast between the light areas of the image and the dark areas of the image and to do that I’m going to take this little node down here in the bottom left, which represents the dark areas of the image. And I’m going to slide that right, and as you can see as I slide that right, It’s darkening the dark areas of the image. So I want to bring this right about here Just to sharpen those dark areas. I don’t want to go too far with it and lose the visibility of the subject here. A little bit like that ill. Come up here now! This node up here to the top right represents the light areas of the image. I’m going to take that, and I’m going to bring this to the left to increase the light areas. And if you notice, we’ve added a great deal, of contrast between the dark and the light areas which is going to be helpful when we go to trace this image, it’s going to give us a more accurate tracing, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and export this real quick, and then I’m going to import it back into illustrator. Okay, so as you can see, I have imported the updated image into illustrator, I’ve taken the original and put it to the side for now. I’m going to go back to that and work with it again in a minute, but for now. I want to take this image here. Let me zoom in a little bit to zoom in. I’m just holding Alt and rolling up the mouse wheel. It’s a good way to zoom in and out what I want to do now is select the image and then go to window and look for image trace, and if it’s grayed out if everything’s grayed out like you see here on my screen, you may have to click off of the image and then select it again and then it will come back and what I want to do now is I just want to toggle the preview on like this, and it’s going to show us a preview of how this image looks if we were to make a tracing of it, but this is not quite how I want it to look. I want to adjust this a little bit, so that’s. What, I’m going to use these settings for now if you notice right here where it says advanced by default, it should be collapsed when you first open your menu, but if you go ahead and just click this little arrow right here to expand that you’re going to want to be able to adjust all of these settings right here. So the first thing I’m going to work with here is threshold. I’m going to adjust that to see how that looks. You don’t want to over expose or add too much add too much. Uh, vectors to the image there that right there looks like a good amount. I’m going to adjust the pads a little bit, and I’m not using any kind of methodology for this. I’m just eyeballing it. I’m just tweaking these settings and seeing how it looks, It’s going to be different for every single image, the settings that’s working for my image Here is not going to work for yours, so you’re going to have to experiment with this A little bit, which I’m actually going to do that right now. I’m going to play around with these settings a little bit and then once. I have them looking how I like it. I’ll go ahead and catch up with you then. Okay, so I’d say that right, there looks pretty good. That’s about as good as I’m going to get this image to look with this tracing feature. So what I want to do now is in order to finalize this. I’m going to go to object and click on expand and click OK, and then we’ll have to ungroup this a couple of times. We’ll go to object Ungroup, and then we’ll do the same thing again, object, Ungroup, and now, if you click off of this image, you should be able to select the different parts of the image and then just delete them by pressing. Delete on your keyboard as you see that I’m doing here, so I’m going to go and delete these unwanted areas and get rid of them and what we are left with. Now is this vector tracing of the image right here as you can see and you can take this and you can use this to create a logo or an image or a design for a t-shirt or whatever you want. So that is how you can make a simple tracing of an image using illustrator. What I want to show you now is how to make a color tracing, so let me take this and then just press. Delete on the keyboard to get rid of it. I want to show you how to do the same thing. Now, only in color. So let me center that up on the page. So basically, I’m going to do the same thing. Only I’m going to choose a different setting up here. I’m going to look for auto color, which is up here to the top left of these icons. I’m going to click on that and wait for a preview to generate there. And as you can see, it’s showing us a preview of how that vector tracing would look in color. So let me adjust that as well up here. We have the number of colors. The more colors you add the more closer, it’s gonna the more closely. It’s going to resemble the original image now. If I bring that all the way up to 89 like you see, I just did, and you may have to be patient with this. This is a little CPU. Intensive that looks nearly identical to the actual image. If I zoom out on that, you can’t even tell that that’s vectors that looks like an actual photograph. So let me bring this down to show you how it looks. On the other end, we bring this down to, like, maybe 16 colors or 17 colors. Give it a second to do. It’s thing there you go now. It’s looking a little more cartoonish and what you can do now is you can adjust the other settings as we’ll like the pads. Maybe increase the pads. See how that looks now? It’s looking kind of more like an oil painting. I’m going to try decreasing the pads and seeing how that looks. Okay, looking a little better corners. Let me try reducing that. See what that does. Okay, So I think I’m going to leave it right about there. That’s a pretty good vector tracing. That’s a pretty good look that I’m going for with this. It has kind of like a maybe, like an oil painting or a cartoonish kind of look what you could do now is go to object expand, just like we did before. Click, OK Object Ungroup and then again object on group, and now you could take these unwanted areas of the image and get rid of them. And once you do that, you should be left with a nice, clean vector tracing of your original image right here as you can see now again, you could take this and you could print it on a t-shirt. You can put it on, uh. You could use it as a logo. Whatever you want to do so. I think that should do it. For this tutorial, that’s how you can go about tracing a vector, Uh, making a vector tracing of an image using Adobe Illustrator. If you have any questions, leave a comment below and as always, thanks for [Music] watching [Music].