- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll introduce you to
the six remaining Pathfinder operations.
Divide through Minus Back.
And the first thing to know about them is none of them
allow you to create a custom shape which is why they get
their own row down here at bottom of the Pathfinder panel.
The other thing to know is that they're a
very uneven utility.
A couple of them, Divide and Minus Back, are quite useful.
The others are just plain weird but I figured you'd still
like to know how they work so here goes.
I'm going to start it off by zooming into Divide and
notice that these guys have daggers or double daggers next
to them and I'll explain what that's about in the next movie
but for now I'll go ahead and marquee these two shapes here,
the purple square and the green ring.
And I'll click on the first icon in the second row, Divide.
And what that's done is it's divided the paths according to
how they overlap.
Now notice once again we have a group, we will after every
one of these operations.
And so, I'll go up to the object menu and choose the end
group command or, better still in the future, I'll just
press Control Shift G or Command Shift G on the Mac.
And now notice that I can drag this guy away.
We also have this little sliver right there and this piece.
And we have one more invisible path that I have to kind of
hunt around for it here.
I've got my smart guides up by the way, that's why it's
highlighting but notice that my arrow cursor has a little
square next to it which shows me that there's something
under it right now and so when I click,
I will select that path.
And just to make it visible, I'll press the D key to apply
the default fill and stroke.
And I'll right-click on the path, choose a range and
choose bring to front, which also has a keyboard shortcut
of Control Shift right bracket, that's Command Shift
right bracket on the Mac.
Another one that I will be using in the future because this
happens a lot.
Any of these Pathfinder operations have a habit of tracing
the negative space.
Alright, so, you could see how that might be useful,
you'd want to divide up your path outlines and
then reunite them using the unite operations.
So that's typically what people do with that one.
Trim, I'm not sure anybody does anything with.
What happens is after you get done marquee-ing your two
paths, then you click on trim and it basically uses the
forward path to trim a hole on the path behind it.
Problem is for reasons that have always defied me,
it throws away the strokes and so I'll go ahead and press
Control Shift G or Command Shift G on the Mac to un-group
these shapes and then I'll click off them, we'll go ahead
and move this guy down so you can see that the square has
been broken but the ring has not been broken and
then we've got an invisible path and I'll go ahead and
find it by pressing Control Y or Command Y on the Mac in
order to switch to the outline mode.
And then I'll click on it of course to select it and
I'll press control Y or command Y again.
And I'll go ahead and drag this guy over here and bring in
the front by pressing Control Shift right bracket or
Command Shift right bracket on the Mac and I'll tap the
D key in order to give it its default colors.
Alright, so that's Trim for you, you might like it,
you might not, you might find a use for it,
I certainly never do but it's there.
Alright, now let's look at Merge which is also a strange one
It unites shapes much like Unite does but IT does so
according to their fill colors so the stroke color doesn't
matter at all, just the fill color.
And so I'll go ahead and click on Merge, which is the third
icon on the second row and we end up with this effect again.
Like Trim, it throws away the strokes but now what I'll do
is press Control Shift G or Command Shift G on the Mac
in order to un-group these shapes.
I'll shift-click on these two guys so this green ring
has been married to the green rectangle and
the purple rectangle has been changed to this shape
that sort of runs through to the other side, so it's still
one shape but then we have these negative space tracings
as well, I'll bring them to the front by pressing
control shift right bracket, command shift right bracket
on the Mac, and I'll tap the D key so that we can see those
otherwise invisible shapes.
Now just got to move these guys around so you can see
what they look like.
Alright, now let's check out Crop.
Crop uses the forward shape to clip the rear one.
So notice if I click on the Crop which is the fourth icon
on the bottom row, we get rid of the rectangle,
it's disappeared but notice if I go ahead and press Control
Shift G or Command Shift G on a Mac, in order to ungroup
these shapes.
We'll go ahead and drag this guy over and then I'll just
kind of marquee this area and tap the D key.
You can see that we actually have the inner circle now
cut away from the outer one and we have that clipped ring
left over as well.
So if you're trying to do some hard crops, this might be
something that you're interested in, although, once again
it gets rid of the stroke.
Alright, so now I'm going to go ahead and scroll down to
this guy right here, Outline and I'll marquee it.
This one is a little bit like Divide but notice if I go
ahead and click on Outline, which is the second to last icon
on the bottom row, we lose the fills, and actually the fills
and strokes get swapped with each other so that we have the
light purple and the light green for our strokes now.
We also get very strangely a line weight value of zero point
which is not something you can normally even enter in
Illustrator that just sets your stroke to none but
in the case of this operation, it gives us actually
a one point stroke.
Just so we can see things a little better though, I'll go
ahead and raise that line weight to three points and
I'll press Control Shift G, Cmmand Shift G on the Mac
in order to un-group the path outlines.
And now I'll just move these guys and you can see what we
get is a bunch of open paths that have been divided away
from each other, tons and tons so at each intersection we
get a different open path outline and, in fact,
this is the one and only Pathfinder operation that
delivers open paths.
Every single one of the other ones leaves you with
closed paths.
Alright, and finally we have Minus Back which is the
opposite, as you might expect, of Minus Front.
Minus Front is often times very useful as is Minus Back.
You have to apply it as a static operation however,
but notice if I go ahead and marquee these three paths,
we're going to cut the two rear paths, that is to say the
purple square and the pink triangle from the single forward
path which is the green ring.
And you can see that if I go ahead and click on the icon
we end up with those two paths being cut away from the green
ring to produce this effect right here.
Alright, so there you have it, folks.
That's how you take advantage of the six static Pathfinder
operations, starting with Divide and ending with Minus Back.
Here inside Illustrator.