Advanced Image tricks & tips in Adobe Illustrator CC

It's time to do some advanced image tips and tricks. There's not much we can do but there's some cool little work flow things I think you'll like. Let's get started. 

So first trick is - I'm going to zoom out a little bit. - I want to bring in an image, and crop it, and not use a Clipping Mask, I want to delete the stuff. So I want to go 'File', 'Place'. And we're going to find the one called 'Desk'. Then click 'Place', I want to make it really big because I want to-- what I want to do is, I want it to fit in a space about a third of my document, right? At the moment that's the space I wanted to fill. What we could do is grab this image and kind of get it to where we want, select both of them. Hit 'Command 7', or 'Control 7' on a PC. That kind of crops it down. We can double click to edit it, get it to how we want. Double click the background to get back out. 

Now the problem with this is that, you can kind of see, if I hover above the image, there's a red band around it. Means the image is actually still in there, which is kind of cool, I can get to edit it, I understand that, but let's say I want to get rid of it because it keeps the file size really big. Having extra pixels that I don't need. And one of my big grouse is there's a lot of times when we try to export kind of do things, and it-- I'll show you what I mean. 'Window', if I go to 'Asset Export', and let's say I want to export this for a website. I'm going to drag it in here, you'll notice it doesn't match up to my Crop Mark. It actually matches up to the full image. So it's not what I want. 

So what I can do is - I'm going to close that down. - I'm going to undo out. Undo, undo, undo. What I can do is I want to get it roughly where I think it should be. Actually I'll give this 'no' Fill. So that's the interesting crop that I want. Now I'm going to crop it full. So it's not really anything to do with us, that's handy, but if I select the image, I can go to this one that says 'Crop Image'. And I can grab the images here, and it will snap to that box. So a similar sort of a process is the Cropping Mask. If I click 'Apply', that now is gone. Deleted all the pixels, there's that line around the outside that I don't need. That now is totally gone, if I go inside of it, it's just that image. Keeps the file size small, and when I use the 'Asset Export' I drag him in, it's just that guy. I know it looks like it's actually on the side, but it's not. It needs to be square. Awesome! 

Next trick. Our next one is, I'm going to go to 'File', 'Place'. I'm going to bring in multiple images. This is quite cool. I can bring in multiple images at once. Nice thing is your arrow keys. So your arrow keys, can you see, I got one of four, but let's say I want to put them in order. So I don't want this one here, I can cycle through and say, that's the one I want, I want that one here, and I want the next one, it's that guy, I was just making it up, but you get the idea. That's where you can go. 

So multiple images. Let's look at bringing in images a slightly different way. Let's go to 'File', 'Place'. There's two ways of bringing in images. We can link them, or not link them. So I'm going to not link this guy and I'm going to link the next person. I'll show you the pros and cons of both of these. 'Bike 1', I'll link this guy, bring him in. One guy's linked, one guy's not. You can kind of tell, one has got the Placeholder or the big X in the middle of it. Now the trouble with each of them. This guy here is linked, which means-- Illustrator works a bit faster, this guy's embedded so he's in the Illustrator file, makes the file size quite big and make the machine run slow. So if you've got lots of images, try and link them, makes them fast. 

The only trouble with this is, if you go and delete that image off your hard drive, 'Bike 1', you're going to hit 'Delete'. It's going to go, "Hey, where did that thing go?" So there's pros and cons. One of the things you can do though, say you got one and you're like, "Actually, stop being linked," it's a pain because I want to send it to somebody and I want it to be all inside the Illustrator file. You can go to 'Window', 'Links' and in here are my images. Once I have this image here, it means that they're embedded and this one's not, that's linked. What I want to do is, this guy, I want to unembed. So I can right click it, and say 'Unembed'. It will ask you where you want to put it. Save it on your hard drive, and we'll make it a link. It kind of gets it out of Illustrator. This one here, I can right click and I can say 'Embed Image'. It will kind of yank it from its link and now it's stuck inside this Illustrator file forever. That can be handy. 

This Links panel is quite handy, open it up because sometimes you've got like-- depends on who you're working with, right? I got things that I work with, and make it work, I don't know how they end up there, but they end up with like a snail trail of design up there, and you're like, "I wonder why this Illustrator file is big" and you're looking at it here, and you're like, "Who's this guy?" And you can click on, I think it's this option here, takes you to the link. It shows me all the way up here, here's that file. Cool. I'm going to close that down and move on to our next trick. The next one is creating-- I'm going to create a 'New Document'. I've done a drawing in my note book, I've taken a photo of it or of a scan, and I want to draw over the top. I want to put it on its own layer. Maybe lower the opacity, make a new layer on top of that. Lock the Background layer, all of that jazz, we've done it before. What we can do is go to 'File', 'Place'. Go down to 'Curvature Tool'. I'm not going to link them, because it's a Template. Let's click 'Place'. It's pretty cool, it goes through, and watch this, I kind of clicked on it, it's faded out. It's on its own layer. It's locked, I've got a new layer to work on, super handy. 

Last thing we'll do is, we'll start pasting images inside of things. Let's say I want this inside of the text. What I need to do is get it where I want it to go. I'm going to make mine a bit bigger because I want to do this. Select them both, make sure the text is on front and hit 'Command 7', or 'Control 7' on a PC. Cool thing about it, the text is still editable I need to double click it a couple of times. Old gag, I know. I click off, click back in the background a couple of times. So with images inside, and the text is still editable. Super cool. 

Now getting inside, say a shape like this. Let's say I'm going to-- it's a new shape. I'm going to make it so it's just a part of circles. If I do that with this and I go, 'Send to Back', try to do the exact same thing, actually it's on its own layer. Sorry, I got it wrong, it's a wrong layer. So I've got you, I've put it at the back, I select you guys and I'm going to go 'Command 7'. It picks whichever one is at the top. So that's not going to work, so I'm going to select these guys, and group them, 'Control G'. Select these guys, 'Command 7'. It works even worse. So what we need to do is not group them, I'm going to 'ungroup' them. And what we're going to do is make him a Compound Shape. The shortcut is 'Command 8' or, there's that 'Command 7' that I was just talking about. There's the 'Command 8', that's the Compound Path. Nothing really happens, right? You're like, "What do you do?" But, magic, now if I do it, now if I do 'Command 7', 'Command 8', 'Command 7', that will happen. 

Awesome! That is it for my tips and tricks for images. Let's get on to the next video.