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

932 Combining translucent vectors with a photo

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

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932 Combining translucent vectors with a photo

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take our various opaque and translucent objects, here inside illustrator, and we're going to blend them with a photographic image. And that photograph incidentally comes to us from the Dreamstime Image Library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke. Alright I'm going to switch back to illustrator, and before we place the image, I want to make one small modification, to this shape right here. And so I'll go ahead and click on it, with a Black Arrow Tool, and then I'll switch to the Gradient Tool, which you can get by pressing the G key. And I'm going to drag this guy right here, up slightly just to this location, so we have a little less black, in the top right corner of the shape. Alright now I'll press the V key to switch back to the Black Arrow Tool and I'll click off the shape to de-select it. And then I'll save some room on screen here, by switching back to the Stroke panel, and I'll switch to the Layers panel, by going up to the Window Menu and choosing Layers. Alright now notice that I've gotten rid of the legend from the previous movie, after all we don't need it anymore. And so I'm going to create a new layer for the photograph, by clicking on the guides layer to select it, and then I'll drop down to the little plus icon at the bottom of the panel. It looks like a page icon in previous versions of illustrator, and I'll alt or option click on it to force the display of the layer options dialogue box. I'll call this layer Image, and then I'll change its color just for the sake of variety, to grass green, and I'll click Okay. Alright now I'm going to zoom out a little bit here, and I'll go to the View Menu and turn on my Smart Guides. They may already be on for you, and then I'll go up to the File menu, and choose the Place command. And then I'll go ahead and locate this file right here. Urban backdrop.jpg. The PSD file has URL. So that's not the one you want. Just select the jpg file, and click on the place button, and now I'll click right here, in the top left corner of the bleed boundary, in order to place that image, and notice that it exactly fits inside the area of the bleed. Alright now I just want to take the image down a little bit. So I'm going to target the Layer, which you do by clicking in a little circle, over here on the right side of the Layers panel. And then you want to go up to the opacity value here, and change it to 80%. And we end up with this effect right here, at which point I'm going to go ahead and take this image, and I'm going to Embed it inside of my illustration by clicking on the Embed button up here in the control panel that's going to make this file quite a bit bigger. However it's going to ensure that we don't lose the link, to the original image file. Alright and then I'll just go ahead and lock this layer down. Now you may wonder about one of the steps there. That one step where when we placed the image, it exactly fit into place, how did I make that happen? Well let me show you, the first thing I'm going to do, is switch to the Artboard Tool, which you can do by pressing Shift + O. And then I want you to notice the size of the Artboard. The width is a hundred and eight points, and the height is 672 points. And that just happens to work well in our videos. Meanwhile if I press the Escape key to escape out there, and switch back to the Black Arrow Tool, and then click on Documents Setup, you can see that our bleed is 18 points all the way around. Alright so with that information in mind, and you probably have to write it down someplace, then you'd return to Photoshop, and you'd crop the image to exactly that size. And you might do that using the Canvas Size command, but I want to show you how things would work with the Image Size command. And so I'm going to change unit of measure to Points, just so I can better see what's going on, and notice that with value, it's actually a thousand and eight, for the width of the Artboard, plus 36 that's 18 times two. So we're counting for the left and right bleed. And that gets us a thousand and forty four points. Or we could go with the height value that 672 this time, plus 36 like so, and we end up with 708 points, and then the resolution value known as that guy right there, it's 72, and the reason it's 72, is because that works out for screen pixels inside illustrator. And then I went ahead and multiplied 72 by four. So we have an even multiple of 72, that's going to make things look really great inside illustrator. And that ends up reconciling, with a resolution of 288 pixels per inch. Alright I'm going to cancel up, because I already did that stuff in advance. And I just want you to see, if I switch back to illustrator, I'm going to zoom in on this artwork, and notice that it's looking great at the 200% view size. It's looking very nice at 300% as well, and it's looking just right at 400%, we pretty much can see every single pixel inside the image, because 72 times four is 288 pixels per inch. Once you start zooming beyond 400%, you're going to see bigger and bigger pixels, but whether you're exporting this for the web, or a mobile device or printing this artwork, it's going to look absolutely great. And that's a combine your wealth translucent objects, including this too guys. Notice this object, which I was calling number nine, and this guy number six, which both have elements set to the screen blend mode, end up blending very nicely, with this grayscale photographic image.

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