Adobe Tutorial

Quick selection is a great tool for selecting objects in any image. It intelligently selects the object distinctly from the background by detecting the brightness, contrast and tonal changes along the objects and their backgrounds. It takes just a little mouse drag with in an object to select an background.

For example : for the image below I just dragged my mouse from point A to point B for selecting the whole apple instead of moving my mouse along the edges of the whole apple which we would require for other selection tools.


This is how my object was selected moving my mouse from point A to B (Please note I increased the brush size to 35 px from options bar after selecting the quick selection tool for making this selection) :



However in the above image, there is good contrast between the object to be selected and its background. So we did not need to train our quick selection tool. But for getting better results in minimum time when there is not much great color difference or contrast between our object and background, it is recommended that you train your quick selection tool.

So in an image like below, where there is not that great color contrast between yellow flower and its background, we would train our tool.

So if I move my quick selection tool from point A to B to select the yellow flower, here is what
I get as selected :


However I did not need this extra highlighted(green) part in my selection(as shown below) which was selected when I moved my mouse from point A to point B. But since there is a low contrast between the orange and the yellow here, this area too got selected.



So instead of selecting my flower in one go as shown above, I follow the steps below to get my needed selection :

1. Select a very small part of the yellow flower as shown after selecting Quick selection tool.


2. Now I will press Alt key and keeping it pressed, I click and drag my mouse over the area I did not want in the selection. So  I brush my mouse over the green highlighted region shown in the second last image.

I also notice that as soon as I click Alt key my mouse cursor changes from "+" to "-" as it tell what area not to select.

Once I am done with that I leave the Alt key back and again move my mouse from point A to B as I did earlier and here is how I get my desired selection :


So here I have trained my quick selection tool not to select what areas of contrast. So if I had the similar background around the whole flower, then I would just drag my mouse once along the boundaries of the flower to tell my tool about the low contrast areas which I do not want to select.

Also keep in mind that if you have a large and random objects to be selected then you should keep subtracting the wrong selections you make as you sweep and not to defer the subtraction task in the end. This trains my tool at every step of selection and tell it what "not" to selection as it goes ahead.


I hope you find this tutorial helpful!

Today we will learn the new features of the tracing engine in Adobe Illustrator CS6 and talk about its new functions. We will trace a photo, a sketch and a texture; then we will compare the results between Adobe Illustrator CS5 and CS6. Let’s get started!

In this tutorial I’ll use a photo a strawberry (credit to deviantART user StockProject1) ; the sketch was kindly provided by Victoria Vasilyeva and the texture (credit to deviantART user ~kingkool6).

---

Step 1

In Adobe Illustrator CS6 the settings of the tracing is in the new Image Trace panel (Window > Image Trace).
This allows us to use other panels and tools while tracing. Such features did not exist in Adobe Illustrator CS5 as well as in earlier releases; the setting of the tracing was made in the Tracing Options dialog box, and then it was impossible to access the other objects and interfaces.

---

Step 2

The presets have also changed between Adobe Illustrator CS5 and CS6
The new preset, "Silhouettes" allows quick creation of vector silhouettes.
After the Expand command we get the vector object with the optimal amount of points.

---

Step 3

Let us evaluate the quality of the tracing using the same preset High Fidelity Photo in Adobe Illustrator CS5 and Adobe Illustrator CS6.
Note, in Adobe Illustrator CS6 you can set several of the Palette values. This parameter sets while the vector image is been made in color or in greyscale. As you can see, the new tracing engine in Adobe Illustrator CS6 shows better results.
There is a new feature in Adobe Illustrator according to which you can instantly check out your original image. To do so, press and hold the eye icon near the View option.

---

Step 4

There were some changes in the Colors parameter. This parameter specifies the number of colors which the final vector image will consist of. In Adobe Illustrator CS5 the Max Colors options can be set in the number values, in Adobe Illustrator CS6 the Colors option can be set accurately in percentage.

---

Step 5

You can get access to additional options of the settings if you press the Advanced key in the Image Trace panel. Now we have an opportunity to choose a tracing method. The Abutting method creates cutout paths. The contours of neighbor objects match.
The overlapping method creates stacked paths, the contours of neighbor objects overlay.

---

Step 6

The Path Fitting option defines the accuracy of the tracing of the initial raster image. In Adobe Illustrator CS5 the smaller value allows to create a more accurate contour, the bigger- the rough contour. In Adobe Illustrator CS6 it is vice versa, the bigger the value is the more accurate contour we get.
The Minimum Area option corresponds to the Noise option in Adobe Illustrator CS6. This option specifies the size of the smallest areas of the initial image, which will be taken into account while tracing.
The Corner Angle option in Abode Illustrator CS5 corresponds with the Corners option in Adobe Illustrator CS6 and is been set in percentage. The higher value we set, the bigger amount of angles the final image will have.
In Adobe Illustrator CS6 there are no such function of the tracing as the Blur and the Resample. In Adobe Illustrator CS5 the Blur function is for the reducing the number of small artifacts and smoothing the jagged edges in the final image. The Resample option allows speeding up the process of tracing for big size images, losing the quality of the output image.

---

Step 7

Let’s see how the new tracing engine works with sketches. Apply the preset Black & White Logo. The tracing of the sketch in Adobe Illustrator CS5 shows good results.
When we use the same preset in Adobe Illustrator CS6 the majority of small details disappear.
Unfortunately, you need to change the parameters of the tracing manually in order to get the same results in Adobe Illustrator CS6.

---

Step 8

Let’s try to make the tracing of the texture. We will use the same Black&White Logo preset. As we can see, the result of the tracing in Adobe Illustrator CS5 looks better than in Adobe Illustrator CS6
I’ve used different presets and operated the parameters manually, but I still couldn’t get the result which would correspond to the result that can be made in Adobe Illustrator CS5.

---

Conclusion

The new tracing engine really works good with the photos and allows quick and accurate vector silhouettes. But when you use it for tracing sketches and textures you will need to operate all the tracing processes manually, and that will not always show good result. If you work with the sketches and textures, the Live Trace feature in Adobe Illustrator CS5 shows good results when you use the presets. Have you used the trace features in Adobe CS6 yet? If so, what do you think?

Changing the size and shape of artboards in Illustrator CS6


In this movie, I will show you how to change the change the shape and size of your artboards.

Illustrator CS6 Tutorial Video,

I have gone ahead and restored the saved version of 8-page newsletter.ai found inside the 02_artboards folder.
 Now the first thing I would like you to do, just to make sure that you and I are on the same page, is to go up to the View menu, and make sure that the Smart Guides command is turned on.
 If you see a check mark everythings good, if not go ahead and choose the command, you also have the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+U and Command+U on a Mac.
 What Smart Guides do is they allow you to align objects inside of your illustrationsas well as artboards on the fly.
 Next step, of course, is to switch to Artboard tool, you can get by pressing Shift+O, or you can just click on it here inside the toolbox.
 But before I do that, I want you to notice something.
 At this point, you can see that page 1 is active because it has a black outline, whereas page 2 or Artboard 2 if you prefer is not selected nor or any of the others, because they have gray outlines.
 If you click on lets say Artboard 4, you can see that it gets the black outline because
its now active and the others are inactive.
Youll also see a number 4 down here in the bottom left corner of the window.
Illustrator goes ahead and numbers Artboards automatically, in the order you create them.
You can override that however that I will show you in a later movie.
Now I will go ahead and switch to the Artboard tool and notice that Artboard 4 is highlighted.
So I just want you to see that artboard thats selected in a standard mode also become selected here inside Artboard mode.
I am going to go ahead and switch back to Artboard 1 by clicking on it and notice that
you have these handles that are surrounding the Artboard.
If you drag one of the handles then you will resize Artboard on the fly and see those green lines, those are the Smart Guides.
So I have got one Smart Guide on the far right side of artboard and another down there at
the bottom thats showing me that I have a center intersection.
So I know that Im exactly aligned to the right side of pages 2 and 6 as well as the

Illustrator CS6 Tutorial Video,

center of the bottom row of artboards.
Now, I am going to drag this bottom handle down until I get alignment with the bottom
of those artboards, and I now have this large artboard that includes 1, 2, 5, and 6 and
has independent artboards inside of it for 2, 5, and 6, which can be a very useful way
to work if you want to have one larger artboard that includes all the artwork inside of a
document, for example, as well as independent artboards for each item.
Its a great way to organize and control the output of your artboard.
You also have some options that are available to you up here in the Options bar.
Notice that I have these orientation icon, so I can switch from Portrait to Landscape
just by clicking on it.
You can also select from preset artboard sizes, such as the popular page sizes letter here
Illustrator CS6in States and A4 in Europe and elsewhere.
Ill go ahead and select A4 for now.
You also have numerical control over the size and location of your artboard.
Lets say, I want to go ahead and switch mine back to 6x8 inches.
I would go ahead and highlight Width value, and you can do that, by the way just by clicking
on the letter next to it.
So Ill click on the W, and Ill change it to 6 in, and then press the tab key, and Ill
change the Height value which is now active to 8 in order to reset the size of that page.
Notice however, that Illustrator went ahead and resized the artboard with respect to its
center, and thats because the center reference point is selected up here in the Options bar.
If I want to position the artboard with respect to its upper left corner, I go ahead and click
on the upper left point inside of that reference matrix, and now Ill change the X value to 0,
and then Ill tab to the Y value and change it to 0 as well, and that gos ahead and restores
the original location of the page. In order to accept the work just press the Escape key
in order to return to the Black Arrow tool.

In this movie, Ill show you how to begin creating the heart outline using the Arc tool  in Illustrator CS6 . Ive saved my changes as All guides.ai found inside the 04_line_art folder. Lets go ahead and switch to Arc tool, and its a pretty easy concept when you drag with a tool you can see that you create as I was saying before, a quarter ellipse. And you might imagine that this is going to serve as well for the first hump in our heart, but we are not going to start at this arbitrary location.



We are going to start right there at the intersection of the central vertical guide and the second horizontal guide down. So I will go ahead and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac, in order get rid of that bad arc. And now I will drag up on to the left, like so, while pressing the Shift key, and you want to drag until you snap to that guideline up there. And you kind of want to inch it back a little bit to the right so that the heads-up display says, a Width of 112 pts and a Height of 112 pts. And by virtue of the fact incidentally that we were pressing the Shift key were getting a perfect quarter circle. So you want to keep that Shift key down the entire time, and then you want to release your mouse button, and then release the Shift key.

In this Case Drawing a heart with the Arc tool in Illustrator CS6 

Now you want to drag from that anchor point, so make sure that your cursor says the word Anchor on it. And you want to drag down into the left until you intersect with the first vertical guideline and the second horizontal guide. Now the arc will definitely go in the wrong direction just as you see on my screen. To flip it, what you do is you keep your mouse button down, and you just tap the F key. Then you go ahead and release the mouse button in order to create the second arc.


Next, we need to go ahead and draw the bottom portion of the heart, and you might be tempted to do one of these numbers, where you draw the outer lump here, and you press the F key in order to flip it, and then you draw a final arc, and you press F again, once to flip it, but that would result in one ugly looking heart. So thats not what we want. Lets go ahead and get rid of those path outlines by switching to the Black Arrow tool and notice, by the way, the Black Arrow has a keyboard shortcut of V, all you have to do is just tap the V key. And you might think of V as being an upside down arrow. So weve got the Black Arrow thats got an upside down arrow for a keyboard  in Illustrator CS6  shortcut, that is the V key. And then weve got a White Arrow, Ill tell you how it works later, thats got a right side up arrow for its keyboard shortcut, which is the A key, which of course also happens to stand for arrow. All right, I am going to go ahead and switch to the Black Arrow, which allows me to select entire path outlines, which is what these things are called inside of Illustrator.

Notice that at this point Im seeing a bounding box around my selected arc. The bounding box extensibly makes it easy to scale and rotate a graphic. But in my experience it gets in the way of getting actual work done, and there are better ways to scale and rotate, as Ill show you in a future chapter. So I am going to advise that you turn the bounding box off, and Im definitely doing so. By going up to the View menu and choosing the Hide Bounding Box command. If you ever need the Bounding Box in the future just choose this command again and of course, its got a keyboard shortcut Ctrl+ Shift+B, or Command+Shift+B on a Mac.

Now I am going to draw this dotted marquee in order to partially select these two path outlines and that will select them both, and then Ill press the Backspace key or the Delete key on a Mac, to get rid of them. Instead what we want to do is go ahead and switch back to the Arc tool  in Illustrator CS6  here, and you want to drag from the last anchor point there, all the way down to the intersection of the middle vertical guide and the fourth horizontal guide down.So its not the long guide, its the shorter one just above it. And you want to make sure you see the word Intersect, so youre intersecting those guidelines, and then tap the F key if necessary in order to send the arc in the other direction, and then release.

Now of course, Arc tool  in Illustrator CS6 Tutorial where our heart concerned, that doesnt look any better than one I showed you before. We are going to make it look way better by manually modifying this arc in the very next movie.

In this movie, I am going to show you how to get around a document using the Page Up and Page Down keys.

Now I am going to be throwing a lot of keyboard shortcuts at you this time.
I am going to expect even the biggest shortcut fanatic to remember all of these.
Just remember this Page Up and Page Down combined with any of the modifier keys, does something in Illustrator cs6 .
So lets go ahead and zoom in quite a bit here, and then Ill press the Page Up key, and notice that I move almost a full screen upward.
And then if I press Page Down, I move almost a full screen downward.
If I want to move in smaller increments, then I press Alt+Page Up, this would be Option+Page Up on the Mac, or Alt+Page Down, this would be Option+Page Down on the Mac.
What if I want to move to the right? Well, then Ill press Ctrl+Page Down, thats Command+Page Down on the Mac.
If I want to move to the left, its Ctrl+Page Up, or Command+Page Up.
To move in smaller increments, once again, you add the Alt key.
So its Ctrl+Alt+Page Down, to move in small increments to the right, and Ctrl+Alt+Page

Illustrator CS6 Tutorial

Up, or Command+Option+Page up on the Mac, to move in smaller increments to the left.
Now of course, that leaves the Shift key, and you may recall from the previous chapter that the Shift key combined with Page UP and Page Down actually moves you between artboards.
So Shift+Page Up, will take you to the previous artboard, as were seeing here.
And in my case, I am going all the way back to the first one.
And then Shift+Page Down is going to move me to the next artboard.
If I press Ctrl+Shift+Page Up, or Command+Shift+ Page Up on the Mac, I go to the first artboard,
and if I press Ctrl+Shift+Page Down, or Command+Shift +Page Down on the Mac, I go to last artboard, which
in my case is the big artboard that encompasses all the other ones.
And that for those of you who are interested is how you get around a document, using the Page Up and Page Down keys, combined with every modifier key you got.

Today we will learn the new features of the tracing engine in Adobe Illustrator CS6 and talk about its new functions. We will trace a photo, a sketch and a texture; then we will compare the results between Adobe Illustrator CS5 and CS6. Let’s get started!

In this tutorial I’ll use a photo a strawberry (credit to deviantART user StockProject1) ; the sketch was kindly provided by Victoria Vasilyeva and the texture (credit to deviantART user ~kingkool6).

---

Step 1

In Adobe Illustrator CS6 the settings of the tracing is in the new Image Trace panel (Window > Image Trace).
This allows us to use other panels and tools while tracing. Such features did not exist in Adobe Illustrator CS5 as well as in earlier releases; the setting of the tracing was made in the Tracing Options dialog box, and then it was impossible to access the other objects and interfaces.

---

Step 2

The presets have also changed between Adobe Illustrator CS5 and CS6
The new preset, "Silhouettes" allows quick creation of vector silhouettes.
After the Expand command we get the vector object with the optimal amount of points.

---

Step 3

Let us evaluate the quality of the tracing using the same preset High Fidelity Photo in Adobe Illustrator CS5 and Adobe Illustrator CS6.
Note, in Adobe Illustrator CS6 you can set several of the Palette values. This parameter sets while the vector image is been made in color or in greyscale. As you can see, the new tracing engine in Adobe Illustrator CS6 shows better results.
There is a new feature in Adobe Illustrator according to which you can instantly check out your original image. To do so, press and hold the eye icon near the View option.

---

Step 4

There were some changes in the Colors parameter. This parameter specifies the number of colors which the final vector image will consist of. In Adobe Illustrator CS5 the Max Colors options can be set in the number values, in Adobe Illustrator CS6 the Colors option can be set accurately in percentage.

---

Step 5

You can get access to additional options of the settings if you press the Advanced key in the Image Trace panel. Now we have an opportunity to choose a tracing method. The Abutting method creates cutout paths. The contours of neighbor objects match.
The overlapping method creates stacked paths, the contours of neighbor objects overlay.

---

Step 6

The Path Fitting option defines the accuracy of the tracing of the initial raster image. In Adobe Illustrator CS5 the smaller value allows to create a more accurate contour, the bigger- the rough contour. In Adobe Illustrator CS6 it is vice versa, the bigger the value is the more accurate contour we get.
The Minimum Area option corresponds to the Noise option in Adobe Illustrator CS6. This option specifies the size of the smallest areas of the initial image, which will be taken into account while tracing.
The Corner Angle option in Abode Illustrator CS5 corresponds with the Corners option in Adobe Illustrator CS6 and is been set in percentage. The higher value we set, the bigger amount of angles the final image will have.
In Adobe Illustrator CS6 there are no such function of the tracing as the Blur and the Resample. In Adobe Illustrator CS5 the Blur function is for the reducing the number of small artifacts and smoothing the jagged edges in the final image. The Resample option allows speeding up the process of tracing for big size images, losing the quality of the output image.

---

Step 7

Let’s see how the new tracing engine works with sketches. Apply the preset Black & White Logo. The tracing of the sketch in Adobe Illustrator CS5 shows good results.
When we use the same preset in Adobe Illustrator CS6 the majority of small details disappear.
Unfortunately, you need to change the parameters of the tracing manually in order to get the same results in Adobe Illustrator CS6.

---

Step 8

Let’s try to make the tracing of the texture. We will use the same Black&White Logo preset. As we can see, the result of the tracing in Adobe Illustrator CS5 looks better than in Adobe Illustrator CS6
I’ve used different presets and operated the parameters manually, but I still couldn’t get the result which would correspond to the result that can be made in Adobe Illustrator CS5.

---

Conclusion

The new tracing engine really works good with the photos and allows quick and accurate vector silhouettes. But when you use it for tracing sketches and textures you will need to operate all the tracing processes manually, and that will not always show good result. If you work with the sketches and textures, the Live Trace feature in Adobe Illustrator CS5 shows good results when you use the presets. Have you used the trace features in Adobe CS6 yet? If so, what do you think?