From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Advanced

Placing an image to create a dynamic link - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Advanced

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Placing an image to create a dynamic link

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- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you the other way to get a pixel-based image into Illustrator. And that's to use the 'place' command to create a dynamic link to the image file on disk. So, the first step is to go up to the 'File' menu and choose the 'New' command, or you can press control N here on the PC, or command N on the Mac. And I'm going to go ahead and change the profile to basic RGB, which these days appears to set the orientation to landscape. I'm going to go ahead and switch it to portrait by clicking on this little icon here. And then I'll click OK. Next, what you want to do is go up to the 'File' menu and choose the 'Place' command, which has a keyboard shortcut of control shift P here on the PC, or command shift P on the Mac. Then, locate the image file that you want to import, and click on the 'place' button. Now, that goes ahead and loads your cursor with the image. At this point, you want to be very careful that you click instead of drag. If you drag with the cursor, you will scale the image as you import it. And that is generally not something you want to do, especially when tracing images inside Illustrator. So just go ahead and click, and you'll import the full-sized image. All right, now assuming that you want to scale the artboard to match the image, go ahead and switch to the artboard tool, which once again you can get by pressing shift O. And then, assuming that you have your smart guides turned on, just go ahead and drag the top left and bottom right corners so they snap into alignment with the image and then you can press the escape key to exit the artboard mode. All right, now go ahead and press control zero or command zero on a Mac to zoom in. Now, let's take a look at a few key differences when working with linked images as opposed to embedded ones. Notice I once again have this link up here that tells me the name of the original file on disk, but if I click on it, I bring up a whole slew of options including edit original. And this one is very important. If I choose this command, then Illustrator will go ahead and switch me back to Photoshop, at which point if I make a modification as I did in the previous movie, or I go to the 'Image' menu choose 'Image Rotation' and choose 'Flip Canvas Horizontal,' and then go to the 'File' menu and choose the 'Save' command to update the file on disk. Now if I go ahead and switch back to Illustrator, notice that Illustrator is aware of the modifications, and asks me if I would like to update the image. At which point if I click yes, then I'm going to see that update occur inside Illustrator. This isn't really what I want, however, so I'll go ahead and choose that command again, or I could just click on the 'Edit Original' button up here in the control panel. And I'll go up to the 'Edit' menu and choose 'Step Backward' in order to turn the image to its original appearance and then I will once again choose the 'Save' command from the 'File' menu, after which point I'll go ahead and switch to Illustrator. Now, let's say I say no, that I don't want to update my changes. I can always update the changes later on by clicking on this link up here in the control panel once again and choosing 'Update Link' in order to reflect the modifications that I made in Photoshop. Another subtle advantage to working this way is that Illustrator has gone ahead and populated my swatches panel, as we are seeing up here in the upper right corner of the screen. And of course if you're not seeing your swatches panel, you can just go to the 'Window' menu, choose the 'Swatches' command, which for me is located way down here. And of course if you can't see your swatches panel, you can go up to the 'Window' menu and choose the 'Swatches' command. Compare that to what happens when you open an image directly. Notice over here in the swatches panel, we have just none and the registration swatch. If you want more, you'd have to click on the little library icon in the bottom left corner of the swatches panel, choose 'Default Swatches,' and then choose 'Basic RGB,' and then you'd have to go ahead and select all these guys by clicking on the last swatch, shift clicking on the first one and then dragging them and dropping them into the swatches panel. So, you can still get to those swatches, but it takes an extra step. And then finally I want you to see when you select an embedded image by clicking on it, you see a selection outline around the outer edge. Whereas, when you click on a linked image, it's an X through the center of it as well. Now, if you ever change your mind, you do have an embed button. So you can just go ahead and click on it to embed that image, and you will lose the X. That's not what I want, however, because that would break the dynamic link to the image file on disk. So I'll just go ahead and press control Z, or command Z on the Mac to undo that change. And then, finally, a little bit of housekeeping here inside the layers panel. I'm going to click on the flyout menu icon in the upper left corner, and choose 'Panel Options'. And then I'll go ahead and increase this row size value to other and I want it to be 70 pixels so I can actually see what's going on inside the panel there so that I have larger previews. And then, I'll just go ahead and rename this layer tracing, let's say, and press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to apply that change. Finally, I'm going to twirl this guy open, and I'm going to rename this image 300 ppi. And by the way, ppi stands for the resolution of this image, which is 300 pixels per inch. And you can see that reflected up here in the control panel as well. And that will become very important in the next movie when we discuss how to autotrace the image. And that is the difference between linking to an image file on disk using the place command versus embedding the image using the open command. And the last piece of good news is that this file with the linked image is about half as big as the one with the embedded image. And so you have a more efficient workflow as well.

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