Convert an image into vectors using Live Trace in Illustrator and then paint it using Illustrator Live Paint feature.
The Complete text from this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re taking an image that we already prepared inside Photoshop and we’re going to use it with the Live Paint tool in Illustrator to color the image. If you haven’t previously seen the Photoshop video and if you’re not sure how to isolate and prepare an image of the kind that we’re way using in this tutorial you may want to watch that one first. But here we’re going to open up our image in Illustrator, trace it and then use Live Paint. To work on the image that we’ve already pre-prepared in Photoshop I’ve created a brand new portrait size image. I’ll choose File and Place and we’re going to bring in the isolated bathing box image that we worked on in Photoshop and we’re going to trace this. But one of the things that you can do in earlier versions of Illustrator that you can’t to do in this version is actually blur the image at the same time as tracing it. And I think this image would be helped if I blurred it a little bit before I actually trace it so I’m going to choose Effect Blur and apply a Gaussian blur to it. And I’ve experimented and about a 3 pixel blur is pretty good for this image so I’m going to click Ok. And what this does is blur some of the noise so I’m going to get a chunkier tracing result. So I’m going to click Image Trace. The initial result is not very spectacular but I’m going to click here for the Image Trace Panel and I’m going to make some additional selections which is going to improve my tracing. But I’m going to start by turning off my preview. I’m going to select Color and I’m going to set this to, for example, six colors. I’m going to set up a low paths and corners setting so that we get chunkier pieces in our image and I’m going to increase the noise reduction to 100 pixels. I’m going to ask to ignore white. I’m going to click either preview or trace. Preview would let me see see these options in place to see if I like it. I know I’m going to like it so I’m just going to click Trace to get all the way there right now. And now we’re done. I’m going to expand this by clicking Expand and now we’ve got an expanded image. I’m also going to ungroup it with Object Ungroup. I’m going to make sure that there is no white in this image. And their actually is white behind it so I’ve actually now selected the white and I’m just going to press Delete to remove it. So now all that’s left in my image is not white so it’s all colored so I’m going to regroup it. And I’m going to convert this for Live Paint so I’m going to choose Object and then Live Paint Make And this converts the object so that I can use the Live Paint tool on it. So let’s go and get our tools. And this is the Live Paint tool here. It shares a toolbar position with the shape builder tool and its letter is K so that might help you to find it a little more easily in future. Now we need our swatches so I’m just going to make sure that my Swatches are visible here. Nope, they’re not, so let’s go and get. Here they are. And I would like to get a special swatch to use here so I’m going to go find some Kuler colors. I’ll choose Window Extensions and then choose Kuler. I already have some Kuler summer colors here so I’m going to select a color combination here that is reminiscent of summer and that will look good on my image. I’m going to choose something that’s quite a ways from the image we already have so let’s choose iGadgets. I’m going to click here and add it to the Swatches panel. That puts it in my swatches so I can now use it. With the Live Paint Bucket tool selected I can click on a color here in this Kuler swatch here and and now watch as I hold my mouse over the image. The areas that are colored in this salmon pink are the areas in which I’m going to be dropping that blue color in. This is my selected color and blue is over the cursor so if I click here we’re going to start painting in blue. The color purple is to one side of the blue and the color yellow is to the other side and you can see them here on the screen on my cursor. If I want to change to use the purple I can just use the left arrow key and start painting now with purple, dropping purple in wherever I want it to be. And if I want to change and paint with a different color such as that green then I can go back over with the right arrow key and drop that into a different position and then perhaps go to the orange and drop that in and even the red. So I can go all the way around this color swatch and if I go all the way around I’m just coming back to the exact same color. So let’s go to red. I’m just going to circle around these colors. Now in some cases you may want to go for something a little bit different so you may want to bring in a color that’s not in the current color scheme here. And we can do that too. So let’s go and get another color. Let’s say that we want to add to this particular color scheme a sort of well let’s go and get some color we don’t already have, say this green here. So I’m going to click on that green and now I’m working in this area of the palette. So now I can add that green to my image. And if I press the left and right arrow keys I’m going to move around the colors in this part of the swatch, no longer in this part. So I’m going to call this good for now so let’s just say that we’re going to use this image. So I’m going back to my Selection Tool. Now the fact that we’ve used Live Paint on this image doesn’t preclude us from doing other things that we’re used to being able to do. I’m going to select the image and I’m going to make a new color group from it. I’m going to choose Selected Artwork and I’m going to include swatches for tints. So these are all the colors that I’ve been using in this image so far. Now with this selected I can click the Edit or Apply Color Group option. I’m just going to move my image out of the way a little bit so that we can see it as we’re working. And the same options that are available to us when we’ve been in this dialog before are still available. I can use this option to rotate around the colors that we have so we’re remapping the colors. What was pink is now some other color within our fixed color scheme. We can also use this one to randomly change saturation and brightness, again within the same colors and we can use edit. And this allows us to move the colors around to make them more pastel, to make them more saturated. And we can even unlock the colors to then apply different colors to our image by just dragging these colors around. And if we get something that we like and that’s not what I’ve got here but let’s say that we like it I’m going to click to create a New Color Group from it and then click Ok. And this is the new swatch for my image. So there we’ve used Live Paint to paint a traced image in Illustrator and all of shapes remain vector objects in Illustrator.
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Learn how to use Photoshop to prepare an image for tracing and painting in Illustrator with Live Paint. Shows how to make a selection on an image, how to use the Refine selection tools to refine a selection then how to convert the selection to a mask. See how to paint on the mask to fine tune the selection. See how to touch up the image to remove white by painting over it and then how to flatten and save the image as a jpg file to take into Illustrator.
The full text from the video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. This video tutorial is part of a series and it’s involving using Live Paint in Illustrator. But we’re going to start in Photoshop because what we’re going to do in Photoshop is to isolate the image and get it all ready to take to Illustrator where we can trace it and apply live Paint to it. In a minute we’re going to take the image of this bathing box into Illustrator and recolor it using live paint. But before we do there’s a fair bit of work that we can do on this image to prepare it in Photoshop. The first thing I’m going to solve is the fact that this image is crooked so I’m going to select the Ruler tool. And from experimentation I already know that this image is going to look better if I straighten it based on the horizontal lines in the image so I’m just going to select that horizontal line and click Straighten Layer. And the image is now straightened and I can just crop it to get rid of the worst of the excess. The next thing I’m going to do is to isolate this bathing box. And to do that I’m going to start with the quick Selection tool because it’s just a very easy tool to use. I’m just going to click and draw on the image. And you can see that it’s jumped a little bit and gone in places that I didn’t want it to go and it hasn’t gone in places that I do want it to go. So I’m just going to drag over the bits that I want to expand it into. And in the places that I don’t want it to be I’m just going to hold the Alt or Option key down to turn it into an eraser so that we’re erasing that area from our selection. That’s a pretty good selection so I’m going to sit with that right now and choose Select and then Refine Edge because this allows me to refine the edge. I’ve got a few problems down this edge here and this edge here and there’s a bit of an issue where the tree line was. So I’m going to have Photoshop have a better look at this image and I’m going to choose the Refine Radius tool. At the moment I’m viewing the selection against white but I could see it as a black and white image. I could see it on black. That’s not actually helping me a lot. I could see overlay or marching ants. But I’m pretty happy with on white. I’m just not totally happy with my selection so I’m going to paint over the areas that I think Photoshop needs to have a better look at. And it needs to have a better look at there although that wasn’t a particularly good result so I’m just going to Ctrl Z to undo that fix and see if I can do a better selection. I think there’s a bit of a fix needed there and a bit of a fix needed down this edge here as well. It wasn’t a very good line so we’ll just undo it and try again. And this is particularly useful when Photoshop hasn’t done the best of selections. You can get it to fine-tune that selection and see if it can do a little better job. I’m relatively happy with that but I’m going to see if contrast will help me. And it seems to firm up that edge a little bit so I’m going to apply some contrast and I could see if radius is going to help. Virtually what I’m looking for here is a pretty good selection that I don’t have to do much with in a minute. I’m going to output to a New Layer with Layer Mask because that will give me a bit of flexibility and I’ll just click Ok. This is now a new layer in the image. It has a layer mask on it. I can zoom into any areas that need some more fixing such as this corner here. I’m going to bring in my tools, select the letter D for default colors, select a brush, I’ve got a fairly hard edge brush, make sure I’m painting onto the mask itself and just paint out any of these areas that I think need fixing. If I want to paint in white I’ll just press the letter X to bring that color back in and press X again to remove the color. And I’m just going to tidy up a couple of little bits here. I want to paint with white. I’m going to click and then Shift Click to paint a line to bring in this roof a little bit better. I’ll just zoom out again and just check around the image to make sure that everything is looking pretty good. I’m still not convinced that this image is straight but we’ll worry about that in just a second. I’m going to add a new blank layer to this image and I’ll press Ctrl Alt Shift E, that’s Option Shift Command E on the Mac, and that will give me the isolated image on its own layer. Now I can straighten it again if I think it needs a bit of straightening. I’m still convinced this is crooked so let’s see if this fixes it. We’ll just straighten this layer. That looks a little better to me. And I’m just going to apply an adjustment to this layer. I’m going to use Levels because this image is extremely dark and it will behoove us to lighten it a little bit before we head to Illustrator. So I’m just going to fix it a little bit. What I am a little concerned about here is these white areas so let’s just click Ok and let’s zoom into those white areas. And I’m going to select these with the Quick Selection Tool or with the magic Wand. Actually I’m thinking Magic Wand will be better here so let’s get the magic wand. It’s got a tolerance of 30. I’m just going to click on that area, click on this line here, this bit here, and there’s another bit over here. I need to Shift Click on those because they’re not being added automatically. Let’s just add them automatically so we don’t have to keep holding the Shift key down. Now that I’ve got those all selected I’m going to enlarge the selection a little bit because it’s a little on the small side. I’ll choose Select Modify Expand and Expand it by just 2 pixels. Now I’m going to add a new layer to this image, go and grab my paintbrush, I’m going to Alt Click on some paint that I’m going to copy and now I’m just going to paint over these areas on a brand new layer. Now this is just flat paint going in but that doesn’t matter because that’s just going to fix this area for us. And now I can select a blend mode and I’m thinking that darker color will be a good one, that we’ll only use the green when it is in fact a darker color. And I can just drag down the opacity of this layer a little bit too because it was a lighter area of the image. But I don’t want it be pure white because I just don’t want white in my image when I get to Illustrator. So Ctrl D to deselect the selection. And let’s just zoom out again. And that’s my finished image and it’s ready now to head to Illustrator to actually do something about recoloring the image. This is the image that we started off with here and this is the one that we’ve ended up with here. So I’m going to save this, choose File, Save As and I’m going to save it as a JPG image. And then we’ll come back in a next video in Illustrator and do something with this image.
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Learn how to selectively recolor a portion of an image using the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and to do so without having to make a complex timeconsuming selection to do so.
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In earlier versions of PowerPoint you could select the size for a Grow/Shrink animation. In PowerPoint 2010 it seems these features are more limited – that’s not the case but to make them more useful you need to know how the animations can be configured.
On a slide with a full size image on it, click the Animations tab and select the Grow/Shrink animation – it is an Emphasis effect.
If you select Effect Options you will see that you can select Both so the animation grows in both directions. Now select Larger or Huge. In most cases, Larger will be sufficient but notice that it appears as if you can only choose Larger or Huge as bigger sizes and that there is nothing in between these two settings. This is where you can get misled.
Click the Animation Pane icon to display the Animation pane. Right click the entry for your image in the Animation Pane and choose Effect options. See that the Size is set to 150 % but you can set it to any value of your choice using the Custom option.
For example, set it to 75%. Here too you can add Smooth Start and Smooth End to the effect and a Bounce to the end of it.
In most cases, you’ll want your animation to start immediately the slide appears so click the Timing tab, set the Start option to After Previous. Set the Duration value to your choice of speed and click Ok.
It’s best to test your animations using the slideshow preview rather than the animation pane.
Here are five cool tips, tricks and keystrokes to help your day go faster in Excel:
Display cell formulas and not results
If you want to see the cell in your worksheet display formulas rather than the results of those formulas then you can do it one of two ways.
Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + ~ to toggle formula display on and off
You can also use Formulas > Show Formulas
Start a new line
When you need to add a line break to a cell to start a new line of text press Alt + Enter in the cell. If you just want to wrap a long piece of text in a cell right click the cell and choose Format > Alignment tab > Wrap Text.
Copy the contents of the cell above
To copy the contents of the cell above into the current cell press Control + ‘.
Moving around super fast and super smart
To move from one sheet in a workbook to the next (or in reverse), press Control + PgDn and Control + PgUp. To move to the next open workbook press Control + Tab or Control + Shift + Tab.
Super quick mouse free SUM formula
Skip taking the mouse to your Ribbon to add a SUM function and do it with a simple keystroke instead. Type Alt + = and Excel adds the SUM function automatically to the current cell. Doesn’t get much easier than that!
