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- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you



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how to customize the autotracing effect,



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specifically using an

option known as threshold,



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which is gonna allow us to preserve



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some of the more fragile

details in the original lineart.



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So I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in here,



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and I'll click on the image to select it.



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And then I'll go up

here to the Options bar,



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and there's this little icon

that says Image Trace panel.



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If you click on it, you'll

bring up the panel like so.



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You can also go to the

Window menu, by the way,



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and choose Image Trace if you like.



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After all, you can get

to all of the panels



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in Illustrator from the Window menu.



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I'm gonna go ahead and move this guy



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off over to the side by dragging it



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from the upper left corner,



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so I don't accidentally drop

it into the other panels.



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Alright, now I want you to

notice this View option.



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Right now we're seeing

the tracing results,



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and that is, we're seeing

the traced path outlines.



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If you wanna see the outlines instead,



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you can choose outlines



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and that'll give you the cyan outlines,



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which are of some benefit, I suppose.



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Or you can switch to the source image



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so that you're seeing the

original pixel-based image



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as it appears before

Illustrator traces it.



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Ideally, what you wanna be able to do



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is compare the original

image to the tracing result,



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and the easiest way to do that



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is to click and hold on

this eye icon right there.



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So if you click and hold, you'll see



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the original pixel based image.



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If you release, you'll see the tracing.



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And what that's gonna help you decide is



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how much of the image is missing



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in the final traced result.



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So for example, look at

the lines inside my eye.



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If I click and hold,

they're a lot more clear.



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We have some thin lines that are there



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to indicate wrinkling, I suppose,



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even though I was only in my twenties.



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And then if I release, a lot

of those lines disappear,



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especially the ones inside Saturn.



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And we can control exactly how that works



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using this threshold option.



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So here's the deal: if I was to



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crank the threshold value

all the way down to one,



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I'm saying the line has to be darker



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than a luminance level of

one in order to be traced,



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which means that we're

not tracing anything



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inside this image whatsoever.



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Because zero is black,

one is extremely dark.



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If I were to crank this

value all the way up



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to its maximum of 255, which is white,



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then I'm saying trace

everything because after all,



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everything is at least

white inside of this image.



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So those are your two extremes,



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what you wanna do is

experiment with this value.



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By default, it's set to

128, if I can get it there,



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which is medium grays,

so we're just basically



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tracing the darkest half of the image



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and leaving the whitest half untraced.



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If you find that you're

tracing too much of the image,



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so you're tracing too many lines



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and you're tracing a bunch

of noise, for example,



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in the image, then you

wanna reduce this value.



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In my case, we've gotta

take it up to about 80,



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now it's 81, in order to

trace much of anything,



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as we're seeing right here.



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But I obviously wanna trace



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much more of the image than this,



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so I'm gonna crank this value up.



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And I ultimately came up with a value,



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if I can hit it here, of 180.



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And notice, every single

time I modify this value,



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I'm previewing the effect

inside the document window



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because I have the preview

checkbox turned on.



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If you don't want that to happen,



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if you wanna be able to modify a value



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without these constant previews,



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which do slow things down,



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then just go ahead and turn

the preview checkbox off



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and then modify the value as desired



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and turn on the preview checkbox



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in order to see the

results update on-screen.



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Now in my mind that's a little too much,



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so as I was saying I'm gonna go ahead



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and take my value down to 180,



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at which point I get a pretty good mix



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because what ends up happening



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if I go too high with this value



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is the text starts filling in,



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and so does my signature down here



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in the bottom right hand corner.



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And so, as I say, you can experiment



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with this value as much as you'd like,



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and you can get a lot of

good results out of it.



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So just so we can see

how far we've come here,



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I'll go ahead and reduce that value



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back to 128, at which

point I will of course



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have to wait for the

modifications to occur on-screen.



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You can see that we were

missing a lot of lines



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at the beginning of this movie,



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but if I now press Control-Z,

or Command-Z on the Mac,



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to undo that change, which by the way



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forces Illustrator to

perform a recalculation,



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you can now see that we've got some



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really good detail out of

this autotraced effect.



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And that's how you control

the amount of detail



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that Illustrator traces

using the threshold value



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in the Image Trace panel.