How to VECTORIZE ANYTHING using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator

hey guys it's charlie and in this how-to video i'm going to show you guys how to turn any photo into a vector graphic using photoshop and illustrator together to make it all work now let's talk about what a vector graphic is first obviously if you have a normal photo right that you shot on your phone or your camera whatever that's a raster based image right everything you do in photoshop is raster based it's pixel based illustrator is completely different it doesn't work with raster based images or pixels it works with vector vector basically means it's lossless meaning you can scale it to any size since there is no pixels it's going to have perfect sharpness which is ideal for things like logo design so today we're going to be taking a photo of a wolf that i found on unsplash.com and we're going to actually turn that into a vector graphic with a few easy steps so it's going to be really exciting hope you guys enjoy it and if you guys do enjoy it turn on all notifications and subscribe so you don't miss another video with that out of the way let's get started our journey today starts on unsplash.com this is where i'm going to find a photo to vectorize and you can use any photo you want by the way it doesn't really matter but i'm going to use a wolf because that's what i used in one of my very first vector videos that did really good but it also got really bad reviews because i didn't explain things that great so i'm hoping to uh kind of redeem myself today so i found this wolf right here i'm going to right click on him and copy image and that's pretty much all i have to do now i can open up photoshop which i have right here now let's start a new document and the document that i'm going to be using today is 2048 by 2048 just for simplicity purposes and the resolution i'm going to make 300 and then the background let's go and make it white so that's pretty much it you can also just use the drop down menu and click white and then for everything else you could just keep that the same and then hit that big blue create button the workspace that i'm in right now is essentials if you guys want to use it you could totally do that and if you guys want to reset your workspace you just go up to window workspace and then go to reset essentials and this is what it looks like default so now we are both at the same spot so your workspace should look like mine since i already copied my image from unsplash all i have to do is press command v on my keyboard so it's already pasted for me and that's pretty much it so let's resize it to about let's say right here we can move it all the way to the right it really doesn't matter at this point and that's it so now we need to remove the background and we're going to use adobe sensei to do that so locate properties and go down all the way you're going to see quick actions and this is what you need to use in order to select your subject so hit select subject and it's going to make a rough kind of selection around your subject it's not going to look the best but that is totally fine zoom in just a little bit and then what i like to do is go to my lasso tool you can use any tool you want and i'm going to hold and shift and you're going to see this little plus icon right so now i can use the lasso tool to reselect the areas that were not properly selected obviously this stuff is super easy it just takes a little bit of time so i would definitely take your time on this but i'm going to rush through it a little bit not going to lie because obviously i don't want to bore you guys to death but yeah i mean it did a pretty decent job this isn't bad so now what i want to do is go to my layers palette and if you go all the way at the bottom of the layers palette you'll see a little rectangle with a circle cut out of it and that is the layer mask so we're going to add a layer mask by clicking that and as you can see it's going to cut it out and it doesn't look very pretty but we're going to fix that in a second so no worries at all what we need to do from here is desaturate our image and i have a really easy way to do that i'm going to select the thumbnail not the layer mask of my layer so the thumbnail which is the wolf and i'm going to hold in shift command u and that is going to desaturate it for me this back part does not look good so what i want to do to fix it is take my ellipse an elliptical tool and we're just going to round the back and then from here what i can do is right click select inverse and now we're selecting the outside and then we can just take a hard round brush and then just paint that away and remember with layer masks black deletes and white adds this looks way better now right so the only other thing i want to do is go up to filter and camera raw filter you could also do shift command a and that will pop up the camera raw filter just like that my goal for this is to bring out as much detail as possible so i'm going to raise the contrast a little bit and then up the clarity a lot and the texture a lot that's pretty much all i have to do and that looks way better let's do before and after before we start vectoring it we need to apply one more effect but in order to do that we do need to convert this to a smart object so i'm going to right click on my layer just the blank area which is like this little gray area right click convert to smart object make sure your foreground is black and your background is white if it's flipped just hit d on your keyboard and it's going to reverse it back okay and that's pretty much all you have to do now let's go up to filter gallery so under filter go to filter gallery and the only effect you're going to need is under sketch it's called stamp let's add that and you can kind of copy my settings but every photo is going to change so kind of go off of your photo i'm kind of digging this look right here i like the contrast of it so i'm going to hit ok and now we are ready to import it into illustrator to vector i'm opening up illustrator real quick for continuity let's go ahead and create the same exact document size so 2048 by 2048 make sure it's set to pixels as well guys not inches and go 2048 by 2048 on the width and height and that's pretty much it hit create now we're back in photoshop so i already have my document prepared in illustrator but there is one thing that i noticed around the wolf's mouth like the teeth it doesn't look very good so i want to try to fix that by adding a stroke around everything and see if that fixes it so i'm going to add a stroke on the outside and just make it black the bottom doesn't look very good but it's okay add a layer mask and then we can make the brush a lot smaller as you can see and just start painting those away see we're masking those away to make this a lot smoother once that's fixed you can go ahead and press command a on your keyboard that's going to select the entire artboard now we can do shift command c and that's going to copy everything together you can also go up to edit and copy merged and let's go back to illustrator do shift command v to paste that in place and as you can see it's a lot smaller that's okay let's just resize it i don't know why it pasted smaller because we're using the same exact document size but that's fine and it's actually okay if it has a little blur to it because we're going to go up to image trace now image trace is literally going to trace over the lines of the image making it a vector so as of right now it is a flat image which means it's rasterized it is a raster image it's pixel based right so it's not a vector quite yet so in order to vector it we just need to hit image trace so click those and then as you can see it's going to trace over it and that looks pretty cool but it's not quite there yet so next to view you're going to see this little image trace panel click that and then it's going to pop this little box up right now we need to go to advanced and we can lower the noise on it this is going to add the detail back to the image mess with path and corners and threshold until you find something that you're really happy with and then you can just ignore white and this is literally going to delete all the white out of the image leaving just the black now just press expand at the very top and this is going to convert the tracing object into paths and you are done now if i were to drag this onto my gray background you can see that it's completely vector it's completely traced i can size this to any size i want and we did that in a matter of what minutes and we could take this so much further if we wanted to we can add color to this if we want i can literally duplicate this and let's go to pathfinder so from here i want to go ahead and merge it and that's going to do its thing and then i can press unite and this should turn it completely black and as you can see we have a separate layer now which is actually a really cool silhouette and now let's go ahead and drag that back into place center everything together that's usually the best way of doing it so now everything's centered and then we can change this to any color we want and then send that to the back and as you can see you're left with this and if you want to you can get crazy with it i can zoom in and then just delete the color out of the eye just like that see i hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did let me know in the comment section below and if you guys would like to share your work with me so i can check it out you guys can follow me on twitter at charliepingusyt or instagram charliepingus i love hearing from you guys all right so don't be strangers but uh that's all i got for today guys keep creating keeping awesome i'll catch you in the very next video baby girl might be bopping on like me too no roof on my top and my babe see through hiding on the pin don't stop ain't gonna feed you

Channel: Charley Pangus

Views: 750,187

Keywords: How to vectorize any image using photoshop and illustrator together, graphic design, adobe illustrator, photoshop tutorial, charleypangus, how to, vector, logo design, adobe, designer, tutorial, adobe photoshop, adobe illustrator tutorial, logo design illustrator, adobe photoshop tutorial, step by step, illustrator tutorial, photoshop, vectorize, vector any photo, illustrator, illustrator cc tutorial, design, adobe illustrator tutorials for beginners

Id: SiKi5tfuDC8

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021