- [Instructor] Alright, now at this point, you may well
worry about how well this artwork is going to print,
because any time you wander down the road
of adjusting opacity, in particular blend modes
in opacity masks, you're wandering well outside
of the post script printing language,
which is why I always recommend, if you're at all concerned
about the integrity of your artwork
that you go ahead and export it to Photoshop.
That's what we're going to do.
Plus, we're going to use Photoshop to apply a few modifications
so I'll go up to the file menu and choose Export
followed by Export As, and notice,
if you loaded D keys, I've included a shortcut
of control shift alt X for export.
That's command shift option X on the Mac.
That'll bring up this dialog box right here.
By default, if this is the first time you've chosen
this command, it'll be set to AutoCAD Drawing.
That's not going to help us out at all.
If you want to bring the image into Photoshop,
then choose Photoshop.psd.
Now, we don't need to worry about the artboards,
so you can leave that checkbox off.
All you need to do is name this guy,
and I'm going to call it Image Export,
and I am including this file along with the exercise files,
but you can feel free to save over it if you want to.
Then, I'll click the Export button.
A moment or two later, you should see a dialog box
that's asking you your color model.
In our case, we want RGB.
Although, if you're planning on working
in the CMYK color space,
this could be a good opportunity to convert to CMYK.
That is totally acceptable.
You do want to write layers if you can.
This option is not always going to be available.
Sometimes when objects or layers have blend modes
assigned to them, then this area is just going to be dimmed,
so you never know how it's going to work out,
but in my case, everything is good to go.
We want maximum editability, obviously.
We don't have any text, so you can switch
the anti-aliasing from type optimized to art optimized.
We should go ahead and embed a profile,
which in this case is Adobe RGB.
Then finally, you can up the resolution if you want.
I'm going to go with other, and I'm going to crank
this resolution value up to 600 pixels per inch
so that I can enlarge the image if I want to.
After which point, I'll go ahead and click OK
in order to generate that file.
You may see a little bit of a lag along with a progress bar.
Illustrator may even threaten that it's not responding
at some point, but in my case, everything worked out fine.
Alright, so I've already gone ahead
and opened this image inside Photoshop.
Here it is.
I want you to see what's going on.
Notice down here at the bottom, we have the gradient layer
expressed as the layer group.
That's what this folder means.
It's a group of layers inside Photoshop.
Then, if you twirl open the subgroup rectangle,
you'll see both the gradient background
as well as the pattern.
I'm going to take both these guys and drag them out
into the gradient group right there,
and then I'm going to select that rectangle group
and press the backspace key or the delete key
on the Mac to get rid of it.
Right now, there's the image layer with its clipping group.
It's just a flat image so I'm going to drag it out
and get rid of that image group by selecting the folder icon
and pressing the backspace key or the delete key on Mac,
and I might as well go ahead and rename this guy image,
and then notice, this is the most exciting part,
our tattoo one and tattoo two layers,
both of which have vector-based mask outlines
associated with them, and those are the masks,
by the way, that we applied to the entire groups.
This is the one that's most amazing, in my opinion.
This guy right there, this layer mask,
which is the opacity mask that we pasted into Illustrator.
So, if you alt or option click on it, you could view
that mask independently of the rest of the image
just as we could view the opacity mask by alt
or option clicking on its thumbnail inside Illustrator.
Alright, I'm just going to click on a thumbnail
for the actual layer itself in order
to switch back to the full color image.
I'm going to crop away this little bit of extra gook
at the bottom here by loading this guy right here
as a selection outline.
You do that by pressing the control key
or the command key on the Mac and clicking on this layer.
Here, I'm moving fast enough that I'm assuming that you
have a little bit of experience anyway inside Photoshop.
That's a command or control click.
Notice we now have a selection outlined around the image.
After which point, I'm going to select the crop tool,
this guy right here, which you can get to
by pressing the C key.
That'll automatically convert the selection
into a crop boundary, as we're seeing right here.
After which point, you want to make sure the delete crop
pixels checkbox up here in the options bar is deselected,
and then you want to press the enter key
or the return key on the Mac,
not one time, but two times in order to apply that crop.
That'll get rid of all that extra stuff
without altogether deleting it.
In other words, it's just hidden.
Alright, I'm going to switch back to the default tool
in Photoshop, which is the rectangular marquee tool,
and I want you to notice something.
Everything looks really good, in my opinion,
and this is a very high resolution image.
Notice that I'm looking at the ear at the 50% view size
and I'm getting all kinds of detail.
But that does remind me that I forgot
that I didn't want the tattoos to go into the ear,
so you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to mask them away right now by switching
to the tattoo one layer right there,
and I'm going to go ahead and add a layer mask
which you can do by dropping down to this add layer
mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel,
and I'm going to click on it.
Then, I'll go ahead and select the brush tool
which you can get by pressing the B key,
and I'm going to right click inside the image window
and I want to take this guy, the hardness value,
and crank him up to 100% like so.
Then, I might take the size value up to 100 pixels,
which should work pretty good.
Now, I'll press the enter key or return key on the Mac.
Notice down here at the bottom of the toolbox
that the foreground color is white.
If that's the case for you, then you'll want to click
on this little switch icon in order to make
the foreground color black.
Now, I'm just going to click right there
and shift click right there in order
to paint a straight line of black.
Actually, that's a little harsh, so you know what?
I'll go ahead and undo that change by pressing control Z
or command Z on the Mac, and I'll right click
inside the image window and I'll take that hardness value
down to, let's say, 77% and I'll press the enter key,
the return key on the Mac, and accept that change,
and I'll try again.
I'll click and I'll shift click.
By the way, when you shift click,
you paint in a straight line.
I'll just paint that garbage away.
That looks pretty good.
Then, I'll scroll over here and I'll click and shift click.
Maybe I want to move in a little bit,
click and shift click once again,
in order to paint that stuff away.
But are you noticing the biggest problem of them all?
For some reason, our path outlines are nice and sharp.
The gaussian blur and feather functions
did not survive the transition.
That's not necessarily going to be the case in print,
by the way, and in fact, if I had exported this
as a flat TIF file, it would've worked out just fine,
but then I wouldn't have been able to edit this stuff.
So, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to select the actual layer right here.
I'm going to click on the layer thumbnail
for the tattoo one layer, and then,
I'll go up to the filter menu and I'll choose Blur
and I'll choose Gaussian Blur.
After all, this is where this command actually grew up,
so it's going to work better inside Photoshop anyway
than it does inside Illustrator.
I came up with the radius value of six pixels,
after which point I'll click OK.
Now, I'll click on the thumbnail.
It's very important, the image thumbnail,
not the mass thumbnail, for the tattoo layer,
and then you can go up to the filter menu
and just choose that first command, gaussian blur,
and that'll go ahead and repeat that filter like so
and now we get these nice, soft transitions.
But we can do even better than this.
Watch this.
Now, this is advanced stuff in Photoshop,
so if you're not familiar with the program,
this may seem a little daunting.
You want to double click on the thumbnail
for this tattoo one layer to bring up this massive
and somewhat daunting Layer Style dialog box,
and then you want to drop down to one of the most
sophisticated functions in the software,
this Underlying Layer slider bar,
and notice what happens if you drag this triangle
right here, this white triangle, over to the left.
You're going to reveal a bunch of bright details
inside the image, including here inside the cheek
and also, I can just scroll up here just by dragging,
up here in the forehead.
At which point, I can see that I'm exposing too much stuff.
So, this is before, and this is after.
I'm taking the brightest pixels in the underlying layers
and forcing them through.
Now, problem is, we're getting these very jagged transitions
so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this guy
down to 210, actually.
Look at that value above my cursor, I want it to be 210.
And these are luminous values.
Zero is black, 255 is white.
That's the way it works inside Photoshop.
We're saying anything with a luminance of 210 or brighter,
which is very bright stuff, is forcing its way through.
But notice that there's this little line
down the middle of the triangle.
If you press the alt key or the option key on the Mac
and drag the right half of that triangle,
it will split apart, and now notice you're softening
the transitions between those highlights
that are being forced through.
You want to take that guy all the way up to 255.
After which point, click OK.
This is something you just can't do in Illustrator.
I suppose you could try to create
a very sophisticated opacity mask,
but it's unlikely it would work this well,
and it definitely would not work this easily.
Alright, now let's do the same with this difference layer.
By the way, the difference blend mode, still in tact.
The hard light blend mode, still in tact.
So, all that goodness survives.
I want to show you something else.
Photoshop offers more blend modes,
especially more contrast modes.
So, after hard light, we have vivid light
and linear light and so forth.
Let's go ahead and try linear light and see how it looks.
Notice that we get some more robust colors going on.
This is before, notice that we have these blues
and these browns, and this is after.
We have these kind of purplish colors as well as these reds.
So, more interesting colors, I think.
Now what you want to do is double click on the thumbnail
for the tattoo two layer in order to bring up
that same Layer Style dialog box.
This time, we know we want a soft transition,
so just go ahead and press the alt key
or the option key on the Mac
and drag the left half of this white triangle,
the one that's associated with the Underlying Layer slider,
and go ahead and take that guy down to, let's say, 220.
That should work out pretty nicely.
Then, I'll click OK.
So, you can see what we've done.
I'll go ahead and scroll up a little bit.
This is before.
Notice, this is a pretty solid line right here.
So is this one over here on the left hand side.
And this is after.
We've got a lot more variation
where those bright skin tones are concerned.
Alright, that's looking pretty great to me.
So, I'll press shift F here in Photoshop
in order to switch to the full screen mode.
Then, I'll press control zero or command zero on a Mac
to zoom out, and I might want to go ahead and zoom in
a little bit more so that we can really take in
the texture on this tattooed face.
That, friends, is how you take a piece of Illustrator art
that's rife with transparency settings and bring it in
for further pixel level modifications here inside Photoshop.