- [Voiceover] Alright there's two ways to bring
pixel based images into Illustrator.
One is the open command,
which we'll be looking at in this movie,
and the other is the place command,
which I'll show you in the next movie.
So, here I am looking at a scanned image
inside Photoshop, by the way.
Just so we can inspect it.
And I drew this cartoon just years and years and years ago
using a rapidograph filled with black ink
on a piece of white bond paper.
So the original piece of artwork looks absolutely black
against a white background.
But I scanned it using a consumer grade office scanner,
so it's looking gray on gray.
And if we were to expect the image a little bit,
you will see a few things wrong with it.
Notice that we've got some gunk right here
that must have been on the scanner glass.
We've got color artifacting
these purple edges and green edges around the lines.
And then if you scroll down here to the bottom,
you'll see that we have a water stain.
You can see the edge of the paper, and so forth.
But the good news is that Illustrator is capable
of filtering out all of this extra information
so that we can hone in just on the line art.
Alright so I'll go ahead and switch over to Illustrator
and because nothing's open, I'm seeing the start screen.
I'm not a big fan of this screen
and if you aren't either, and you wanna turn it off,
then you can press control k here on a PC,
or command k on a Mac
to bring up the general pane of the preferences dialogue box
and then just go ahead and turn off
this check box right there show start workspace
when no documents are open, and click okay.
And all that stuff will go away.
Alright so method number one
for getting the image into Illustrator
is to go up to the file menu and choose the open command.
Or of course you have that keyboard shortcut
of control o, or command o on the Mac.
And then I'll just go ahead and locate that scanned image,
and click the open button in order to open it
inside of a new illustration.
And I notice the art board is a little bit larger
than the image itself.
It could end up being smaller.
It's just a function of the fact that this is an RGB image,
and so Illustrator went ahead and put it inside
of a default basic RGB document.
If you want the art board to be the same size as the image,
then go ahead and click on it to select it.
Make sure under the view menu
that your smart guides are turned on.
And then, switch to the art board tool,
which you can get by pressing shift o,
and I'll go ahead and press control zero,
or command zero on the Mac, to zoom out just a little bit
and I'll drag the upper left corner of the art board
until it snaps into alignment with the image,
and then I'll do the same thing
with the bottom left corner of the art board,
and then I'll press the escape key
in order to return control to the black arrow tool.
Alright I'll also go ahead and press control zero,
or command zero on a Mac, to zoom in.
Now notice the image is still selected,
and Illustrator is identifying it over here
on the far left side of the control panel as an image.
And if you like you can click on the word image
to see the file name.
You'll also have the file name listed right here,
and notice it's telling me the entire path
so it's aware that at one time,
this is the file that I placed inside the document.
The thing is, there's no link between that file
and this document as things stand now,
and that's because Illustrator has gone ahead
and embedded the image.
The image is actually part of the document.
And so for example, if I was to switch back to Photoshop,
go up to the image menu, choose image rotation,
and choose flip canvas horizontal,
in order to flip the image horizontally like so.
And I'll even go up to the file menu and overwrite
the original file by choosing the save command.
Then, when I switch back over to Illustrator,
nothing happens.
And that's because there is no link to that file on disk.
Again what we have instead is an embedded image.
If you wanted to unembed it,
you can click on this unembed button right there.
In order to save this image either as a layered PSD,
which is a native Photoshop document,
or as a TIFF image, either one.
But that's gonna go ahead and create
a new version of this image,
and establish a link to that image file instead.
That's not what I wanna do, however,
so I'll just go ahead and cancel out.
Alright now while this is an easy way to work,
because it just requires the open command,
and it's a totally acceptable way to work.
We could now trace this image
by clicking on the image face button
up here in the control panel.
The problem is Illustrator isn't terribly efficient
at dealing with embedded images.
And as a result, you get large files.
So for example, this file is gonna weigh in
at about seven megabytes.
Which isn't horrible, but we can get a much smaller file
and we can create a link to the image file on disk
using the place command.
And I'll show you how that works in the very next movie.