From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

979 Enhancing a Photoshop path in Illustrator

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

979 Enhancing a Photoshop path in Illustrator

- [Instructor] All right now I'm going to show you how to take a vector-based path outline that you've drawn in Photoshop and enhance it in Illustrator, which is, where vector-based path outlines are concerned, a much more powerful program. And so here I am in Photoshop. I'm going to go up to the window menu and choose the paths command in order to bring up the paths panel, and then I'm going to select this path outline right here, half a heart, and I'll zoom in on it as well. All right, now I'll press the A key to select the black arrow tool, the one that Photoshop calls the path selection tool, by the way, and then I'll click on this path outline in order to select it, and so notice that it traces the left hand side of this heart. And now I'll go up to the edit menu and choose the copy command, or you can just press control C or command C on the Mac. Now I'll go ahead and switch over to Illustrator, and you can see that I've already drawn all of the suits in advance, but I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on this top smaller heart right here and I'll create a new layer by going over here to the layers panel, dropping down to the little plus sign, used to look like a tiny page, and then I'll press the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, and click. And by virtue of the fact that I have the alt or option key down, that forces the display of the layer options dialog box. And I'll just go ahead and call this guy new heart, let's say, and I'll change the color to violet. Should stand out nicely and then I'll click OK All right, now I'll return to the edit menu this time inside Illustrator and choose the paste command, or you can press control V or command V on the Mac. At which point, you'll probably get this alert message that's asking you would you like to paste this as a compound shape, which is fully editable, or a compound path, which is faster. And if you're hearing the chuckle in my voice, it's because this is utter nonsense. Neither of these options is going to do you any good. This is a standard path outline. It's not a compound anything. So just go ahead and select compound path. That's a better way to go and click OK. And you'll create this new, in my case, invisible path outline. Now notice over here on the far left side of the horizontal control panel, up here at the top of the screen, assuming that you are seeing the control panel, we have a group. Why is it a group? No reason, none whatsoever. This makes no sense that this is a group. So, what you want to do is go to the object menu and choose ungroup, or you have that keyboard shortcut of control shift G or command shift G on the Mac. And now I'm seeing that it's a compound path. Now, there is just no reason for this. This is a simple open path outline. There's nothing compound about it. So right-click anywhere inside the document window and choose release compound path. And now you have a path outline, which is exactly what we want. All right, now notice that this path outline has no stroke and no fill. So, it's entirely invisible. I'm going to click on this fill swatch on the far left side of the control panel, and I'll change it to this shade of red right here, the one that begins R=237. And we have a red half a heart. All right, I'll go ahead and drag this guy by its anchor point, and if you want to do this by the way, the bounding box needs to be turned off. And so, go to the view menu, and make sure that this command right here reads show bounding box. If it reads hide bounding box, go ahead and choose it. Otherwise, in my case, I'm going to press the escape key. And now I'll drag this anchor point until it snaps into alignment right there with the existing heart, which happens to be relegated to this suit's layer right here. I'm going to turn that suit's layer off, and I'll press control plus, or command plus on the Mac, to zoom farther in. All right, now, what you want to do is press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the direct selection tool, even though it has a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow, and you want to select this anchor point right here. So both of the end points, actually, this guy and this guy. So shift click on this one so that they're both selected, and you need to make sure that they're exactly aligned with each other by going up here to the control panel, once again, and clicking on horizontal align right. Actually, any of the horizontal options will work, but I'm going to go with right, and that's going to end up scooting one of those points ever so slightly. All right, I'll press the right arrow key in order to nudge those points to the right. And now what you want to do is press the V key in order to switch to the black arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the selection tool, even though it has a keyboard shortcut, a V, which is an upside down arrow, all right, so I'll go ahead and click on the shape to select the entire thing. And now you want to select the reflect tool which shares a fly-out menu with the rotate tool. It has a keyboard shortcut of O, which is, after all, the most symmetrical letter possible, both horizontally and vertically. And now I'll go ahead and position my cursor right here at either one of these end points, by the way. And then you want to press the alt key, or the option key on the Mac. So, you're seeing a little ellipsis next to the cursor and then click. And that's going to set the origin point for your transformation right there. And it's also going to bring up the reflect dialog box. You want to set the access to vertical. So you're flipping around a vertical axis, and then you want to click the copy button in order to create a copy of the path outline. Now you want to press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and then shift click on the first half of that heart. And now you want to join them together by right clicking inside the document window and choosing join. Or you also have a keyboard shortcut of control J or command J on the Mac. Now that should fuse the entire shape together. To confirm that that is the case, press the A key to switch back to the white arrow tool, and click on this anchor point right here. And makes sure it's just one point, as it is in my case, and then undo that change. So, I'm just dragging the point around. And now I'm going to click on this guy, which used to be two independent end points as well, and I'll drag it, and you can see that it is also fused into one. Now this is a terrible heart at this point. So, I'll press control C, or command C on the Mac, to undo that change, and then I'll press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool. I'll click inside the shape to select the entire thing, and I'll return to the edit menu and choose the copy command, or you can press control C or command C on the Mac. Now I'll go ahead and switch back to Photoshop, and I'll click below half a heart here inside the paths panel in order to turn it off. So, as you can see, that hides the path outline. Then I'll switch back to the layers panel. You want to make sure that either of the heart layers have selected either black heart, which I created in the previous movie, or heart of pixels, doesn't matter. And then return to the edit menu, this time in Photoshop and choose the paste command, or press control V or command V on the Mac. At which point, Photoshop is going to ask you how you want to perform the paste. This time it matters. You do not want to paste this guy as a smart object. You definitely don't want to go with pixels. Path isn't going to do you any good. You want a shape layer. Why a shape layer? Because a shape layer is a scalable vector-based layer inside Photoshop, and in our case, we just want to fill it with red, a solid color. So shape layer is going to work out beautifully, at which point I'll click OK, and in my case, I end up with this black heart. All right, I'm going to switch to the move tool. which you get by pressing the V key, once again, upside down arrow, as is the case with the black arrow tool in Illustrator. And I'll go ahead and drag this guy down. I'm not snapping properly. So I'll just go ahead and use the arrow keys in order to nudge this heart into a better location. And then I'll turn off that heart of pixels layer which is the pixel base layer, by the way. I'm going to go ahead and turn it back on. So we can see, if I zoom in on this guy, that we have these glumpy edges right here, and we have a bunch of JPEG artifacts on the inside of the heart, that's no good. And so I'll go ahead and turn that guy off and turn shape one back on, and I'll rename this guy heart, let's say, 'cause that's what it is. And now I'll double-click on this thumbnail right here to bring up the color picker dialog box, which is going to affect the fill, by the way. And I'll just go ahead and dial in some values. A hue value of zero degrees is just fine. I'm looking for a saturation value of a hundred percent, let's say, and I'll set the brightness value to 90%. So, it's just a little bit dim. Actually, I might take the saturation down, as well. Let's see what it looks like if I take it down to 90%, let's say. So zero 90 90 is what I'm going with. I'll click OK, and then I'll change the blend mode from normal to multiply. And that way we're burning the heart into the light gray card in the background. And now I'll zoom out just a little bit so that we can see that we have these pristine edges, and there are no JPEG artifacts inside the heart. So we have one continuous color and these very, very smooth edges. And you can scale them to any extent you like. And that, my dear friends, is how you take a vector-based outline that you've traced inside Photoshop and enhance that shape in order to create an absolutely symmetrical heart inside Illustrator, by the way, that just a few moments later you bring back into Photoshop.

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