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In this exercise, I want to show you how I went about preparing my tracing
template inside of Photoshop so that it would work best for me inside of Illustrator.
This might seem sort of strange that we're going to switch to Photoshop for an
exercise, but it really is a great way to work, because it's much easier to
sketch out an idea on a piece of paper, throw it on a scanner or even take a
picture of it with a digital camera than bring it in a Photoshop, prepare the
image so that it's going to work nicely as a tracing template inside of
Illustrator, and then of course, bring it into Illustrator.
So I'm looking at this document called Ghost robot.ai and you may recall if I
go ahead and turn off these layers right here from Backdrop up to Type and we
just have Ghost vectors and Ghost template left. What I did was I went ahead
and traced this Ghost template item right there and I really just grabbed the
pencil, piece of paper, sketched it down, scanned it, brought it into
Photoshop, then brought it into Illustrator. That's simple. It really doesn't
take that much time. Then most of my time, where putting the ghosts
together was concerned, was spent actually assembling these vectors right
here and tracing the various elements that I needed to use in order to
build my robot. Now the nice thing about this template, I'll
go ahead and zoom in on it, is that at all times here, I can see it and keep
track of my objects at the same time, my vector-based objects, because I went
ahead and made sure that my Ghost template was sketched in orange, which is
just a color that stands out nicely, especially if I go over here and Ctrl- click
on this eyeball or Command-click on the eyeball in front of the Ghost vectors
layer. Then I can see the Wireframe or Keyline version
of my illustration right here as black outlines, and of course, transparent
fills. So I can very easily keep track of what are the vectors, which are black,
and what is the sketch, which is orange. So how do you go about preparing
such a tracing template? You do most of the work inside of Photoshop.
So, I'll go ahead and switch over to Photoshop right here, which I have running
at the same time. Now what we're seeing right here is an image called Robot
ghost gray.jpg and this is the image as I scanned it. So I went ahead and as I
say, sketched it out using a pencil and a piece of paper, scanned it and then
opened it up inside Photoshop. Now the lines look awfully dark. That's because
of the automatic shadow compensation provided by my scanner. So my
scanner went ahead and made the pencil lines as dark as possible. We also
have some grayish paper going on. So what I want is black and white. I want
to get rid of all that extra gray stuff. So I go up to the Image menu and I would choose
Adjustments and I would choose the Levels command. You may think, well, you
could apply an adjustment layer, right, if you wanted to keep everything nondestructive
and protect your original image and all that jazz. In this
case, it's just a tracing template. So I'm not going to get too hung-up on making
permanent modifications to this image. So I'll choose the Levels command.
You can see, this hump over here on the left side of what is known as a
histogram inside of this dialog box. This, up right there, represents the
darkest colors inside of my image. So these would be the pencil lines, which
aren't quite black. Then this area of colors right there, this hump over here
on the right-hand side of the graph, that would be the paper colors. I know
that because the darkest colors are on the left and lightest colors are over here on
the right. So if I drag this white slider triangle over
to the left, like so, to be left side, i.e., of this right hump, then I'm going
to make all of those paper colors nice and white, which is what I want.
Then I'd go ahead and darken up the pencil lines by dragging this black point
over to the right side of the little sort of shadow hump over here.
So I have Input Level values of 40 and 170. We're not concerned about this
so-called Gamma value in the middle here. We're just concerned about the Shadow
value of 40 and the Highlight value of 170. If you are unfamiliar with the
Levels command and you don't know what's going on quite, then check out my
"Photoshop CS4 One-on-One: Advanced" series. The very first chapter inside of
the Advanced series covers Levels and Curves, and I think you'll find it quite insightful.
All right, I'll go ahead and click OK. Now I want to make all of my black lines
orange, like this. This is the final version by the way. This one is called
Robot ghost color.tif. This is the very image that is placed into the Ghost
robot.ai illustration. So how do I make those lines orange or some other color?
Well, what you do is you go back, of course, to the grayscale version of the
image. I did go ahead and scan this as a grayscale image. So it's not going to
allow me to add colors at this point. So notice, if I go up to the Image
command and choose Adjustments, then all of the color correction options right
here, anything that has to do with the actual Hue and Saturation values inside
of an image, they are all dimmed, because I can't add any colors to the image at this
point. What I have to do to allow colors to occur,
I have to go to the Mode submenu and I have to switch from Grayscale to RGB
or CMYK or something along those lines, but RGB is your best bet. Again, this
is just a tracing template so we don't care, we don't need it to be CMYK because
we're not going to be printing it. So go ahead and choose RGB color, and then,
you go up to the Image menu, you choose Adjustments. Now notice all of these
commands are available to you. The one we want is Hue/Saturation. So what you
can do is you can say, well, I want to colorize this image, which we do, and I
want to colorize it orange, which happens to have a Hue value of 30 degrees.
Let's go ahead and take the Saturation value up, way up to like 75, and we are
starting to bring out some oranges inside of the robot. But the core lines are
still black. They are not being colorized with orange. If you want that, if you
want to make those orange, which is what we ultimately want, then you need to
bring up the Lightness value. Now normally I don't monkey around with the
Lightness value, but when preparing a sketch like this one that works out beautifully,
I'll go ahead and take this Lightness value up to +50, and now we have
a nice, orange robot. So it will be really easy to trace. Click OK and then go
ahead and save it out, of course. Then you would go back to Illustrator, you
would set up your Ghost template layer, right there. You create a new layer.
Then you'd go up to the File menu. You would choose the Place command in order
to bring in your illustration. We've seen this before. That's why I'm just
kind of running though it briefly here. Then you would double-click on the layer in
order to bring up the Layer Options dialog box here and you would turn on Template,
turn on the Template checkbox and then set Dim Images to whatever you want
it to be. By default, it's 50%, but I raise mine to 65% and then click OK.
You've got yourself a delightful template that you can use to set all of your
objects exactly into place. Now you can see that I sometimes went my own
way when setting up my vector objects here in front of the tracing template,
which is of course just fine. You can make any decisions at any point in
time that you like. In the next exercise, I'll show you how to
fuse objects together, fuse simple objects to make more complicated objects here
inside Illustrator.