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