Discover how to create a graphic image using layers and image tracing in Adobe Illustrator. This article provides detailed instructions on importing an image into Illustrator, adjusting its visual properties, and recreating it into a vector form using the image trace tool.
Key Insights
- The process of creating a graphic image starts by creating a new layer and importing the desired image onto the Illustrator's artboard. Adjustments on the image perspective can be done using the hand tool.
- A powerful tool in Illustrator, the image trace allows for converting imported images into vector forms. This function offers a variety of options to alter the final image, such as adjusting the colors, paths, corners, and noise levels of the image.
- After tracing the image, the image can be separated into multiple layers. These layers can be edited individually, allowing the removal of unwanted elements like the background or adding more details to the image. Saving your work regularly is recommended to avoid losing progress.
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In this video, we'll be creating the recruiter on the right hand side of our postcard. Before doing this, let's work within our layers panel.
The first thing we'll do is we're going to hide our back guides by checking the visibility. Next, we'll lock all three of our current layers so that we don't accidentally click them and move them. Let's adjust our perspective using the hand tool, shortcut H on the keyboard, and drag our perspective over to the right so we have plenty of gray open space to work with to build our recruiter.
Let's now import our image. Before doing so, we'll create a new layer and we'll title this layer recruiter and hit ENTER. From here, we can import our image.
We'll go to file, place, and we'll be selecting our graphic woman jpeg and click place. From here, we can click and drag our image into our artboard and here we have a graphic of a woman. This will be used as our recruiter.
I'll then hit control shift a and we can look at this image. As we can see, our recruiter is currently on a red background and so we'd like to remove her from the background as well as adjust her. If we zoom in, we'll also see that up close our image is relatively pixelated and not in great resolution.
Therefore, we're going to recreate her within illustrator as individual pieces of a graphic. So let's zoom out. We could go about this a couple different ways.
The first way would be with the pen tool and with the pen tool we could click and drag creating each of the shapes that makes up our woman. The second way to do this is to create an image trace. To do this, we'll use v on the keyboard and select our image and from here we'll go into properties and scrolling down to the bottom we'll select image trace.
With image trace, we have many different options and let's just simply check the default. Image trace is a powerful illustrator tool that allows it to see an image and recreate that image tracing it into a vector form. Looking at this now, this doesn't give us a great look at the original image that we had.
Therefore, let's go back into image trace within properties and we'll toggle the image trace panel. From here, we can make many different changes to our graphic image trace. We'll go to preset and rather than default, we'll click the drop down and let's see what three colors looks like.
We click, we'll see that it changes and we're starting to get a better image here. However, we still want to add more colors. We'll click preset again and let's go to six colors and this looks much more appropriate.
We can see we are missing some of the definition of her face and it hasn't done a perfect job but this looks much better. We can then toggle through different presets even going up to high fidelity photo and high fidelity photo will give us more definition. However, looking at some of these edges, they're a little more difficult to work with.
So, let's zoom out and let's go back to our option that gave us six colors. Ultimately, when doing an image trace, it takes a little bit of practice to determine what will work best. I found that creating a shape that's relatively clear and not too overly complicated gives us the best result.
If we go below now, we can adjust our colors from here and make more specific and advanced changes. Adjusting our level of paths from two percent will give us less paths. If we drag it up to the higher end, we'll see that this will give us an image with more paths, more jagged lines and anchor points.
I found that the lower amount tends to look a little bit better. So, let's leave ours right at about 15%. Next, we have corners.
This will mean that we have more anchor points and more ways where our image changes on the lines. If we zoom in, we'll see that right now they're relatively normal curved lines. However, if we drag our corners all the way to the top, we'll see that our image changes.
Looking at this now, our lines are a little clearer and more curved. If we drop our corners all the way down to zero percent, we'll see that our image doesn't take on quite as nice of a look. So, let's increase our corners up to 79%.
Next, let's look at noise. If we zoom out, noise will ignore areas of specific pixel size. So, along our edges where it's very pixelated, these will be simplified.
If we scroll to the highest end, we'll see that our image is much more simple and less pixelated. And on the lower end here, we'll see that it incorporates all of the pixels or as many as it can. For this, let's increase it and we'll bring it up to 75 pixels.
It's important when we make adjustments in the future that we're all working within the same piece of art. Therefore, let's match our characteristics matching six colors, 15% on paths, 79% on corners, 75 pixels for our noise. So, in order to now take this from a preview of the image trace to the actual image trace, we can click expand or expand in our control bar.
We'll click this and we now have multiple layers for our recruiter. As a first edit step, let's double click going into isolation mode within our recruiter and we'll click the red background and simply delete it. We can see we also have a white edge here that we'll delete as well.
Exiting, we'll see that we now have our recruiter transparent. However, we need to do a little bit of work to touch up our recruiter. For now, let's save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard.
We'll close our image trace panel and in the next video, we'll begin editing our recruiter image and touching it up. See you there!