- [Voiceover] In this movie I'll show you how
to expand and simplify your auto traced artwork,
so that you can access the path outlines directly using
Black and White Arrow tools.
And so, for example, where this artwork is concerned
Illustrator has gone ahead and traced
the top edge of the paper.
And we also have a single little piece of dust
right over here that I'd like to get rid of.
And that's the point at which you just go ahead
and expand your artwork so you can modify
the path outlines directly.
And so I'm going to go ahead and zoom back out here.
And I'm going to create a new layer
by dropping down to the little page icon
at the bottom of the layers panel,
and Alt or Option clicking on it.
That forces the display of the layer options dialog box.
At which point I'll go ahead and call this guy
"Expanded Paths" let's say.
And then I'll click OK.
Alright, now I wanna copy the 600 ppi
version of the artwork.
So I'll click on this little circle to select
it right there, and then I'll press the Alt
key or the Option key on the Mac;
and drag either of these blue squares
and drop it onto the new layer.
And because the Alt or Option key is down,
that goes ahead and duplicates the artwork
as opposed to moving it.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and collapse
the tracing layer and turn off it's eye
so that it's no longer visible.
And then I'll go up to this Expand button,
up here in the control panel,
and click on it.
Essentially anytime you see the word "Expand"
inside Illustrator that's going to convert
this special object to static path outlines.
And sure enough, in our case, we end up
with this group; and we can tell it's a group
because we're seeing the word "Group"
over here on the far left side of the control panel.
But I want to gain direct access to all the paths,
so I'll go up to the object menu and choose the "Ungroup"
command, or you can press Control + Shift + G,
or Command + Shift + G on the Mac.
And now I'm going to go ahead
and zoom in here on this top junk.
And I know I want to get rid of this little guy,
so I'll go marquee it with the Black Arrow tool.
And then press the Backspace key,
or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it.
And then I'll just marquee this garbage up here at the top,
and I'll again press the Backspace or Delete key.
Alright now let's say you want to simplify
the path outlines a little bit,
Illustrator offers a feature that does exactly that.
And so the first thing I'll do is press Control + A
or Command + A on the Mac in order to select
all the path outlines.
And then I'll press Control + H or Command + H
on the Mac to hide those anchor points
so we can better see what we're doing.
And now you want to go up to the Object menu,
choose Path, and choose Simplify.
Now by default, Illustrator goes a little bit
too far, and we can see that by turning on the
preview checkbox...
(speaker chuckles)
And that just looks absolutely ridiculous.
The good news is we've dropped
from 29,000 anchor points to just 4600.
But of course the bad news is,
that our artwork is absolutely unidentifiable.
So, we have a couple of options here.
We've got the angle threshold that determines
the maximum angle of our corners.
And so notice that as you crack that value up,
you typically get better and better results.
And so, I could take it all the way up to 180.
But then we're not really dropping
too many anchor points here.
Which is why I ultimately took it down to
150 degrees like so.
And then what you typically want to do
is crank the curve precision value
all the way up to 100%. And that still is going to give us
fewer anchor points than we had before.
Notice that we've dropped about 9000 anchor points.
And then I just go ahead and press the Down
Arrow key while this value is active
'til I'm no longer comfortable with the results
that I'm seeing onscreen.
Which happens at about 97%;
things start to shift a little bit too much.
Which is why I went ahead took this
value back up to 98%.
And notice we've still got way fewer points,
about half as many anchor points as we had before.
Which means that this document
is going to be a lot easier to export and to print.
And now I'll just go ahead and click OK
in order to except those results.
And just so we can see the difference nice and close here,
I'll go ahead and press Control + Z
or Command + Z on the Mac.
These are the unsimplified paths.
And then if I press Control + Shift + Z,
or Command + Shift + Z on the Mac
to redo that simplification,
we see those simplified path outlines
with only about half as many anchor points
doing some really great work inside this illustration.
Alright and just because Control + H or Command + H,
that keyboard shortcut that hides the anchor points,
because it's sticky, it's actually saved
as a state in your document.
I'll go ahead and press Control + H
or Command + H on the Mac
in order to bring back those anchor points
and I'll click off the illustration to deselect it.
And that friends, is how you expand
and simplify your auto traced artwork
here inside Illustrator.