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[♫ Upbeat introduction music ♫] [Adobe TV Presents Colin Smith in] [No Stupid Questions] Illustrator introduced Live Trace a long time ago, and it's a really powerful feature. It just needs a little bit of help, and the best place to get help is Photoshop. I'm going to show you how you can keep Live Photoshop elements, Live Trace together and update them; let's have a look. Here we are in Illustrator CS5. On the right hand side, this is an image that I'm going to trace. Up at the top if I click the Live Trace button, this is the example we get much like the one on the left, and for some people this is fine, but you'll notice lots of little problems down in here, and we're losing definition in his eyes. We're losing a lot of the clarity in the image. On the left is the exact same image, but it's been opened up in Photoshop, and I'll show you what's going on there. If we jump to Photoshop, this is the image, and there it is on the background. There's lots of detail inside here that really is completely useless to Illustrator so I'm going to run a smart blur on this, and you do that right in the filter menu, blur, smart blur, and smart blur what it does is it's smart enough to blur inside the edges but not around the outside of these high-contrast areas, so if I just turn that off and turn that back on, you can see I've got a layer now where that's working a little bit better. Next up, I notice that when I live trace this, I was losing some definition in his nose area and in the eyes so by just adding an adjustment layer, and you can do that simply by coming down here and choosing the levels adjustment layer, or you can go to the levels over here on the adjustment panel, and what I've done here is I've just created levels on the right hand side that's brightening up these areas. Remember it's not important what this looks like in Photoshop; it's more important how Live Trace is handling this, so when I force the area above the eye to be lighter, then it's going to trace it accordingly. Again, below this eye, underneath the nose, and the other adjustment layer I added was a darkened layer so if I turn that off and turn that back on, I'm just darkening the area on the right hand side of the nose. Just to let you know how these are created, whenever you add an adjustment layer for something like levels you get a mask inside here, and if I hold down the Alt key on windows, option on Mac, I'll see that mask. Basically whatever is black is hidden, what's white is showing, so whenever I come into this area and paint with white, I'm actually painting in that lighter area. So you've got complete control with a soft edge brush to introduce those colors. Next up, if we just save this and go back to Illustrator, Illustrator is going to warn us that something's been updated. Do we want to update this now? Click okay, all of sudden you see on the left hand side it's already looking better. We can see a bit more definition around the eyes. It's starting to pop out a little bit more under the mouth now, but we've got more work to do. I actually want this to be a grey scale image with some more clarity; back to Photoshop. Next up, posterize. In this particular posterize setting has a level of 2, and you can see that it really starts to knock this out to more of a solid color. Next up, I just created a layer and filled it in with white. This is no different than any layer that you would grab a paint brush and start painting white out so as I paint this out, it's going to be traced as white instead of black, and then we've got another level inside here, and this one is really great. So if I turn off that white layer, what this level's layer is doing, if we look over here on the right hand side, you can see that I've just taken the output value and lowered it, which makes everything that was white grey, and then when we paint white it looks like we've got nothing in the background so now we're getting closer to our grey scale image with black accents and our white background. So I'll save this, jump back to Illustrator. It's going to warn us, again, update? Yes, okay, now we're getting close. Next I want to add a grey scale look to it. So in our presets we've got lots of them inside here and you can create your own. I'm going to go to grey scale, and for the levels I'm just going to choose 4 levels of grey scale, and then double click inside here. This takes me right back to my settings, so this is the grey scale settings, and this is the important one down here: ignore white. We want the white that's in the background to disappear instead of having to delete it in Illustrator, I'll choose to ignore white, click trace, and watch what happens when I bring this to the front, and I drag it over. Wow, what a difference between the old and the new. This is such a great way to work. Remember we're still connected to the Live Photoshop file on the other side so if there's any tiny little area you don't like, grab a paint brush and start painting, and as you notice, it doesn't really matter what color it is. I think we had some yellow in there, and some black and some grey. The final result here is a beautiful grey scale traced gorgeously in Illustrator CS5. Let's have fun with some Live Trace. [♪ Alto sax music ♫] [Presenter/Music Collin Smith, Executive Producer Bob Donlon, Producer Karl Miller] [Director/VFX Kush Amerasinghe, Post Production/DP Erik Espera] [Adobe TV Productions]
