Create a dramatic park service poster

- [Instructor] Let's see how we can combine Photoshop with Illustrator to get the best results from Image Trace. In this example, I am creating a parks poster and I'm starting with a relatively small original pixel based image. This was captured with an infrared camera, which explains the colors. And I want to be able to scale this up dramatically and also give it a different feel, a more illustrative feel. So I'm going to begin in Illustrator where I will create a print document, tabloid sized. Because I'm going to be printing it, I'll come to more settings and add a three millimeter bleed. And then I'll come to the final menu and choose place. And place my image. Let's zoom in on this. Obviously it's much smaller than we want it to be. By vectorizing it, we will be able to scale it to the right size. But let's first of all trace it. I'll just click on image trace. This uses the default black and white option. I'll come to the image trace panel. We're going to need to switch the mode here to color and because there is a lot of detail in the clouds and to avoid a nasty banding effect in the clouds, I'll need to switch the palate to full tone. You can see that with the limited color palate, which limits you to 30 colors, we're going to get this kind of result, which is not what we want at all. So I'll need to change the palate to full tone. Obviously this is going to create a more complex result with more act points. So it's going to take longer to trace. Now the result we get is much better, but it looks too much now like the original. We don't want it to look photographic, we want it to look like an illustration. So now I'm going to come to the window menu and to my links panel. And I'm going to edit the file in Photoshop. Now I want to do a few things to this to really amp up the drama and to simplify the detail in the sky. I'll convert the image to a smart object. Then I'll come to the filter menu and to stylize and oil paint. Now oil paint is going to kind of smooth out the detail in a way that is going to yield, I think, a better tracing result. How much stylization and how much cleanliness you apply, that's up to you. But I suggest that you do not want the lighting option to be turned on because that's going to simulate a canvas texture. So I'm going to go with let's say five and five for both the stylization and the cleanliness. I also want to apply some sharpening. The oil paint filter will kind of smooth things out and then I want to sharpen things up as well. So I'm going to come to smart sharpen and apply way more sharpening than one ever would to a photographic image. I need to keep focus on the fact that I'm preparing this image to be traced and what looks good as a pixel based image does not necessarily yield the best tracing result. Now having applied these two filters, I'll save this and we'll switch back to Illustrator where the file and the image trace will now update. Well that looks much closer to what I'm after, but I think I would also like to simplify the sky somewhat. So I'm going to come back to Photoshop once again and add a levels adjustment that will darken the sky. I'm moving my black point slider close towards the center. We are seeing that a lot of that wispy detail in the sky is now just falling away. Obviously that's also making the foreground way too dark. But to now compensate for that, I'll come to my gradient tool. I'll make sure that black is more foreground color. I'll choose a foreground to transparent gradient and make sure that I'm working with a linear gradient and drag up from the bottom to the top. So that pretty much restores the bottom portion of the image to how it was. We can see the gradient now applied as a mask. I'm also going to paint on that mask by coming to my brush tool and staying in black, increasing the size of my brush. I'll just pint over the cactus, itself, so that it is not darkened by that levels adjustment. I noticed there are a couple of blemishes, I'll add a new retouching layer above everything else and with my clone stamp tool, just sample a good bit by alt clicking and then paint over the blemish. I should mention that for my clone stamp tool, I have its behavior set to sample current and below. All right, let's not go and evaluate those changes. I'll save this. We come back to Illustrator, we update the image and the trace also updates. And I think I need to make one more pass. I think I just need to simplify some of the detail in the sky. So back to Photoshop once again, working on this retouching layer. I'll stay in my clone stamp tool and just remove some of that fine detail in the sky. And I'm just going to make a rough selection. Don't need to be super accurate here because when it gets traced, things are going to get simplified anyway. It allows me to just get in closer to that piece of the cactus. I'll drop that selection now. And just simplify any detail that you suspect is not going to vectorize in a sympathetic way. I'm also going to just switch to my brush tool. This again, painting on a separate layer, so it's all non-destructive. Switch to just my brush tool. Sample this area, making sure my brush is a rounded brush. And just round off the edges of the clouds. Okay, so having done that, we now have in our Photoshop document, we have two filters applied as smart filters, we have an adjustment applied to the sky with a layer mask attached to that and then at the top of our layer stack, we have some retouching to simplify the sky. I'll save it once again. Back once more. Update. I could refine things further, by moving these sliders, possibly increasing the path fitting and possibly moving the noise slider to the left so that even the smaller details are captured. But I find that most of the effect comes from how you prepare the Photoshop image, so I'm just going to leave these as they are. And when I'm happy with the tracing result, I'll expand it. That's going to give me a lot of blue outlines. Blue being my selection color. I'll now zoom out. Might be a good idea to just hide those guides by pressing command or control+h. I'll move this down to position it relative to the bottom bleed guide, hold down my shift key and scale the whole thing up, which of course we can do now that we have vectors without diminishing the quality at all. And just going to add a clipping rectangle to the bleed guide and on the layers panel, I will choose make or release clipping mask. Now all that remains to be done is for me to add the text. I'm going to lock this layer, create a new layer and then with my type tool, just type that in. Currently way, way too small. The typeface that I want to use is called Bungee, Bungee regular, it is available on Adobe fonts. I'll scale it up by holding down the shift key, dragging from the top corner. I'm going to center it and then align it to the center of the art board. And we can move it down into position, possible scale it some more, and change its color to white. And then just to present this, I'll come to the view menu and look at it in trim view so that we don't see the bleed. So we see how we have this interplay between Photoshop and Illustrator. I was able to achieve this result through the application of filters. In this case, the oil pant and the smart sharpen, through the application of an adjustment layer to darken the sky and the addition of a retouching layer to smooth out and remove any distracting details.