- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you how to trace
a piece of artwork using nothing but uniform strokes.
And you can see here that the effect are pretty great.
The thing is, it's a more intensive process
for Illustrator so it takes more time.
So this piece of artwork happen to start as a pencil sketch
that I did with my youngest son, Sam.
And then I took it into Photoshop and firmed up the lines.
Alright, so here's how it works:
Step one is to go to the file menu
and choose the new command, or of course,
you can press Ctrl+N, or command+N on the Mac.
And I once again started with a basic RGB document
and I went in, switched the orientation to portrait,
and clicked OK.
Alright, next step is to go to the file menu,
and choose the place command
or press Crt+Shift+P or Command+Shift+P on a Mac.
And then, if you're working along with me,
go ahead and locate that scanned pencil sketch,
and click the Place button.
And then, click inside the document window,
don't drag, just click,
in order to place that image on the art board.
Alright, next I'm going to go ahead
and switch to the art board tool,
and as you can see here,
I've switched back to the single column tool box
just to take up less room on screen.
And now, assuming that your smart guides are turned on,
go ahead and drag the corners until they snap into alignment
with the corner of the artwork
and then press the Escape key to exit the art work mode.
Alright, now I'm going to go ahead and zoom in
on my artwork quite a bit so I can keep track
of the top portion of this document.
And I'll go up to the image trace button,
and simply click on it to start things off.
And if you get that warning saying
there's too much resolution, just go ahead and click, OK
in order to ignore that dreadful advice.
In a few moments later,
Illustrator will work its default magic on the image.
Alright, now what we want to do is
bring up the Image Trace panel,
which you can do by clicking on this
Image Trace icon up here in the Control panel.
If necessary, go ahead and twirl open the Advance Settings,
like so, and for now, turn off the preview check box.
And the reason is,
I've already explained how these options work
and I just want to dial in a bunch of them
that happen to work well for this particular image.
So, I'll start by taking the threshold value
all the way up to 230 and that way,
we're tracing more of the artwork instead of less.
And I'll Tab my way down to the Noise value,
and take it down to just five pixels.
Next, you want to turn off Snap Curves to Lines,
and turn on Ignore White so that we're going to end up
tracing just black and not white.
And then finally, turn off the Fills check box,
and what that's going to do is force Strokes to turn on.
You can trace both filled and stroked paths if you like,
but that's not really the effect we're looking for.
So just go ahead and turn off the Fills check box.
And then, click on the Trace button.
That's an alternative to the Preview check box by the way.
An alternative way to at least invoke a trace.
And a few moments later, you should see
a bunch of trace strokes on screen.
If Illustrator freaks out a little bit in the mean time,
don't worry about it.
It shouldn't crash, it should hang in there,
but you never know.
Again, this is a complex process for the program.
Alight, now given the default settings,
we have a ton of gaps in the illustration
and that's because of this Stroke option right here.
And notice it's telling us the maximum width and pixels
that will be recognized and converted to strokes paths.
So in other words, the bigger the value,
the fewer gaps you'll get.
But you don't want to take the value too high,
because that will result in longer delays.
So what I recommend is you move in kinda baby steps
and so what I'm going to do is
take the Stroke Value up to 20 pixels
and then press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac
to invoke that change.
And notice the Preview check box is back on
so in a few moments, we should see a progress bar or two.
If it just seems like Illustrator's ignoring you,
just hang in there and wait a moment
and notice I never did see a progress bar
but Illustrator did go ahead and complete the trace.
Now what we want to do is check things
to make sure everything looks the way it should
and you should see very few, if any gaps inside the artwork.
In particular, this little pocket pen
should be traced in its entirety.
And in my case everything looks pretty darn good.
Now one of the things about auto-tracing stroked artwork
is you cannot control the line weight
until you expand the path outlines.
So I'm going to go ahead and close the image Trace panel
and I'm going to make some modifications here
inside the Layers panel by clicking on a fly-out menu icon,
choosing Panel Options, then selecting Other,
and changing that value to 70 pixels.
And then I'll just go ahead and rename the layer Tracing
and twirl it open as well.
Now, we want to keep the original traced artwork
we don't want to lose it.
So what you can do is copy and paste in front, if you like.
But my experience is that Illustrator,
as often as not when you copy this piece of artwork
will crash, at least on this machine.
So, an alternate to using the Clipboard at all
is to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac
and drag this item, like so, just drag it up a little bit.
And so that's an Alt+drag or an Option+drag
and that'll create a copy of it
without going to the Clipboard,
which is a lot easier on Illustrator,
and possibly easier on your nerves as well.
Alright, now I'm going to turn off the original.
And then I'll go up the the Control Panel
and click on the Expand button
in order to scan this special object to Static Path Outlines
and then I'll change the line wight to 1.2 points
in order to produce this effect here.
And if you get a little warning saying that
Illustrator can't do it,
just click OK and it should do it anyway.
Alright, now we want to simplify the art.
So go ahead and press Ctrl+H or Command+H on the Mac
to hide the anchor points.
And then go the the Object menu,
choose Path, and choose Simplify.
And this one really responds poorly to the default settings
This sun is a complete mess and this moon is a disaster.
So what I suggest you do
is once again take this Curve Position value up to 100%,
then press the Tab key and notice,
assuming the preview check box is turned on,
that the number of anchor points goes up,
which is not what we want,
so go ahead and click in that Curved Position value
and press the Down arrow key in order to reduce the value
until the artwork starts to change
more than you're comfortable with,
which once again happens for me at 97%
so I'll press the Up arrow key to take that value up to 98%
but we're still losing more than 1000 anchor points
which is great.
And then I just experimented with this Angle Threshold value
but notice how the moon's hand changes; his elbow as well.
When I take that value up to 100 degrees,
we get a little more bending action.
And incidental, you can take this value all the way up
to 180 degrees if you like, but to my mind,
that doesn't create exactly the right effect.
So, once again, I'll take it to 100 degrees
You can see we're still dropping
more than 1000 anchor points,
at which point I'll go ahead and click OK
to apply that change.
And that's how you trace a piece of scanned artwork
using nothing but Uniform Strokes, here inside Illustrator.