- [Voiceover] In this movie, we'll take a look
at how you place an image
that includes transparency.
So here I am looking at an alternate version
of that angry emoji inside Photoshop by the way
and so wherever we see the checkerboard pattern
those are transparent pixels.
And so in this case, we're looking at a PNG file
but it just easily be a TIFF image
or a layered PSD document.
And wherever illustrator sees transparency
inside of an image,
it goes ahead and respects it.
And so let's see what that looks like.
Alright I'll go ahead and switch back over to Illustrator
and notice my nameplate layer is active.
And so I'll go up to the file menu
and choose the place command
or you can place that keyboard shortcut
of CTRL+Shift+P or command+shift+P on the Mac
and then I will find the infuriated emoji right there.
And I'll just go ahead and double click
on him this time in order to load up my cursor.
Now click right about there to replace my face
with this illustration and I might just go ahead
and nudge it upward as well,
and because we have that dynamic transform effect
assigned to that entire layer.
Illustrator goes ahead and repeats the emoji
on each and every name plate.
Alright I'll just go ahead and zoom in
on this guy like so.
And notice that wherever the image
is transparent, we're seeing through
to the photograph in the background.
Now this can make stroking a little tricky by the way.
And so let's say I wanna stroke a border
around the emoji's face.
Then I would go the window menu
and choose the appearance command
to bring up the appearance panel
and then I would click on the add new stroke icon
in the bottom left corner of the appearance panel.
And let's say I decided to take this guy down
to 0.5 points so just half a point
but of course we're not seeing it
because there's nothing for illustrator to stroke.
So what we'll need to do is make sure
the stroke is selected
then click on the fx icon
down here on the bottom left corner.
Choose convert to shape
and then this time choose ellipse
because after all, this guy has a circular face.
And then if you turn on the preview checkbox,
you can see that the stroke
is way out here at this point.
What we want to do is take the extra width
and extra height values down
and I came up with, just by trial and error,
a value of -29.5 points
for each one of these values.
And that pretty much nails it
even though the stroke is a little bit low
because there's a drop shadow built in to the image.
And so to fix that, we'll go ahead and click okay
and then I'll drop down to the fx icon once again.
Choose distort and transform
and choose the transform command.
And now I'll turn on the preview checkbox
and then I'll click inside the vertical move value
and I'll press the down arrow key a couple of times
in order to take the vertical value down to negative two
which moves the stroke up two points
which aligns the stroke to the emoji's face.
At which point I'll go ahead and click okay
to accept that change.
Alright now, a couple of extra things I wanna mention here,
I'm gonna go ahead and click the emoji over
and click on my face in order to select it
and that selects the clipping mask by the way.
And so to switch to the image,
you wanna click on the second icon
on the far left side of the control panel.
The one that reads edit contents
and then you're gonna see the name of the linked file
and you're gonna see two important pieces of information.
The second one is the resolution.
So we now have 577 pixels per inch.
And the reason we have more pixels per inch
than we did on the outset, you may recall
when we first place this image,
it had a resolution of 300ppi
and the reason it has more pixels now
is because I reduced its size.
So by scaling the image to 52%,
I packed a lot more pixels into a smaller area
and that's why we have a higher resolution.
That is not gonna hurt a darn thing
and for printing purposes by the way,
anything more than 220 pixels per inch
is gonna look good.
Anything higher than 267 is gonna look terrific.
Now this first item
is the one that might worry people.
Notice that this is an RGB image,
now conventional wisdom tells us
that if this image is bound for print
especially if I were to commercially reproduce
the document then I should convert the image
to CMYK inside Photoshop
before placing it into a CMYK document
here inside Illustrator.
In fact, that is in no way, shape, or form necessary.
Illustrator as well as Photoshop and InDesign,
all use the exact same color engine
and its known as the Adobe Color Engine or ACE.
And so Illustrator is just as capable
of converting photographic images
from RGB to CMYK on the fly as Photoshop is.
The difference is, Illustrator does so non-destructively
whereas if you convert an image
from RGB to CMYK in Photoshop,
that's not just a destructive modification
that's an extremely destructive modification.
So when in doubt, leave your images
as RGB files when you place them
into either Illustrator or InDesign.
And so that, friends, is how you place an image
that includes transparency
as well as how you keep your photographs
in the RGB color space here inside Illustrator.