- [Voiceover] In this movie,
we'll take a look at the Advanced Tracing options.
Which again, are made available to us
inside the Image Trace panel.
So, I'll start things off by clicking
on the line art in order to select it.
And then I'll click on the triangle
in front of the word, advanced
or the bottom of the image trace panel,
in order to expand these many additional options.
I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in on these details
in front of the pencil.
Which are intended to indicate flecks of graphite.
And we're gonna start things off
with this Noise option right here.
If your image is noisy, that is it contains
a bunch of random flecks,
then you can crank this value up to ignore smaller details.
And at 71 pixels, we're saying that anything
that is smaller than 71 pixels will not get traced
And as a result,
I lost a lot of those little bits of graphite.
And I also lost the interior
of the A, the O and the R.
Which, of course, is not what I want.
And that's because this image is a very clean image.
It's low noise, and that's largely a function
of cleaning your scanner glass before you scan your artwork.
And that way you don't have a bunch
of dust and junk all over the place.
And so I'm gonna take this noise value down to five pixels.
And press the Enter key, or Return key on the Mac,
in order to apply that change.
After which point we'll see more flecks of graphite,
and we'll see the interiors of those letters.
Next we have this corners value here,
and it decides the weighting between smooth points
and corner points inside the traced artwork.
And so let's say, I'm not really liking
all the little corners on the graphite once again
and throughout the rest of the art.
Then I can go ahead and crank that value
down to something like 10 percent,
and that's gonna give me a lot fewer corners
than I had before.
And so of course, if you take it down to zero percent,
you're pretty much not going to have any corners at all.
But at 10, we have much smoother results.
Paths, is gonna determine the fidelity of the line art.
How many paths are used.
Notice down here at the bottom of the panel,
we can see that we have 3,473 paths
and a little more than 39,000 anchor points.
If I want better fidelity, I would just go ahead
and crank that Paths value up to 100 percent,
which is gonna give me a lot more complexity.
You can see we have almost 2,000 more paths,
but our anchor paths have shot up to 103,000.
And we've got some very wiggly looking line art right here,
which has a high fidelity factor.
But is possibly a little less smooth than I'd like,
which is why I ultimately came up with a value here.
A Paths value of 94 percent, which is gonna help
to smooth out the artwork dramatically,
and it basically cut the number of anchor points in half.
Alright, now notice Snap Curves To Lines,
that check box right there.
What that's gonna do is it's gonna take
slightly curving lines and it's gonna make them straight.
Now it doesn't make too much difference
where this artwork is concerned.
Notice I went ahead and turned the checkbox off.
But it may make a difference with schematic artwork.
So if you have a lot of rulered lines,
that is lines that you do with a straightedge.
Then you would probably want to leave
that checkbox turned on.
Also notice right here the number of colors is set to two.
And that's because Illustrator is tracing
both the black line art
and the white stuff in the background.
I don't want that, so I'm gonna turn on
the Ignore White checkbox.
And that's gonna reduce the number of colors,
as you'll see in just a moment here, to one.
Alright, we also have this Create option,
which will either create filled-path outlines
as we're doing right now.
Or you can create stroked paths in addition or instead.
And for now, I'm gonna leave that off
because that really slows things down, but I will show you
what that looks like in a future movie.
And then finally, we've got this Method option.
Which allows Illustrator to create
overlapping path outlines.
And while you may get slightly better results out of that,
that's gonna kick the number of colors back up to two
because Illustrator is going to trace
both black and white path outlines.
And notice now that the Ignore White checkbox is now dimmed.
Which is why I'm gonna go ahead
and press Crtl + z, or Command + z on the Mac,
to undo that change.
Because I really, for this art,
only wanna trace the black paths.
Alright so that pretty much takes care
of everything we have control of during a tracing process
Which is why if you're satisfied with your results,
you probably wanna go ahead and save a custom preset.
By clicking on this little fly up menu
toward the top of the panel
and then choosing, Save as New Preset.
And now I'm just gonna go ahead and call
this guy Freeform ink art and click OK.
After which point, you will now see it
not only available in this pop-up menu,
but it will be available the next time you create a tracing
up here in the control panel.
Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and press Crtl + 0.
Or Command + 0 on the Mac, to zoom out.
And I'll click off the artwork as well
and hide the Image Trace panel.
And now I'm gonna twirl open this tracing layer
so we can see the difference here.
I'll go ahead and turn on the 300 ppi tracing,
and I'll turn off the 600 ppi for a moment.
That was Illustrator's default attempt
at tracing the medium-resolution artwork.
And this is the much better, custom,
higher-resolution resolution tracing.
Thanks to our ability to finesse the tracing process
using the advanced Image Trace panel controls
here inside Illustrator.