How to make a Duotone Image Effect in Illustrator?

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SECTION: 4
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Course info

104 lessons / 10 hours 33 quiz questions 31 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hey there, I'm Dan Scott, an Adobe Certified Instructor with over 16 years of design experience under my belt, I'm part of the Adobe Expert program, and my online and in-person classes have been attended by more than a million people, just like you! Join me as we dive into the exciting world of Adobe Illustrator Advanced! In this course, you're not just leveling up in Illustrator, you're transforming into an Illustrator SuperHero!

In this course you will work on a bespoke brief designed to ignite your imagination, coupled with immersive course videos, you'll be crafting jaw-dropping graphics in no time. Throughout our journey together, you'll flex your creative muscles and construct projects that will elevate your portfolio to new heights. So, let's dive in and unleash your creativity!

You’ll learn:

  • - How to use artificial intelligence to boost your creativity in ideation. 
  • - The quick way to take hand-drawn sketches and vectorize and color them. 
  • - The building blocks needed to set you loose on a huge variety of beautiful effects and techniques.
  • - To make beautiful charts and graphs for your documents. 
  • - Color mastery to make quick color adjustments, Pantones, and blend it all together beautifully.
  • - How to master images inside of your illustrator workflow. 
  • - To harness all the secret gems that'll help you level up your typography skills. 
  • - All the tricks of the trade for drawing complex shapes easily. 
  • - To double your creativity with the Transform and Distort section. 
  • - To speed up your personal workflow to get the most out of your creative day.

Explore the full course outline for a comprehensive list of topics that will expand your Illustrator prowess beyond imagination.

If you're already comfortable navigating the basics but want to  unlock the true potential of Illustrator, then this Illustrator Advanced course is your ticket to becoming a master of Illustrator! So join me and the ranks of design superheroes and let's embark on this thrilling journey together.

Requirements:

- All you need is a copy of Adobe Illustrator, you can get a free trial from Adobe here to get started.
- A basic knowledge of Illustrator is required. I recommend watching my Illustrator Essentials course prior to embarking on this epic adventure.

Who this course is for:

- Creative adventurers who already have a basic understanding of Illustrator.
- Self-taught Illustrator enthusiasts yearning for structured guidance.
- Graduates of my Illustrator Essentials Course, hungry for more knowledge and skills.
- Visionaries who have developed their own unique Illustrator approach but crave exploration of the vast universe of tools, updates, and time-saving techniques.

What you'll learn:

- How to use Text to Vector Ai
- How to use Text to Pattern Ai
- How to use Generative Recolor
- When to use the Scissor Tool, Eraser Tool & Knife Tool
- Advanced Shape Builder Uses
- The differences between the Pathfinder Vs Shape Builder
- How to use the Join tool & Joining Path Ends
- Advanced Pen Tool Tricks
- Width Tool Advanced Techniques
- The Curvature Tool
- How to master corners with corner widget effects
- How to work with Compound Paths
- The difference between Expand & Expand Appearance
- How to create Graphic Styles
- How to make Symbols
- How to use the Smooth Tool
- Advanced use of Simplify Path
- What Live Shape Effects are for
- How to make Repeating Grids & Concentric Circles
- How to make Random Objects
- Advanced Keyboard Shortcuts in Illustrator
- How to add a Gradient on a Stroke
- How to add a Gradient in Text
- How to use the Freeform Gradient tool
- How to use Advanced Color Swatches
- How to use Global Color Swatches
- What is the difference between RGB vs CMYK color modes?
- How to proof colors
- How to use Pantone Spot Colors
- Recolor Artwork & Changing all colors at once
- How to use Blending Modes
- How to work with Images & Blending Modes
- How to make Black & White Images
- Learn Advanced Workflow Tricks
- All the Super Selection Mastery
- How to use the History Panel
- Advanced Fonts Tricks & Tips
- Use Retype to know what Font is being used
- How to put Text Inside a Letter or Shape
- How to use the Touch Type Tool
- How to add a Connected Stroke Around Multiple Shapes
- How to Offset a Stroke with Text
- How to make a Bar Chart in Illustrator
- How to make a Pie Chart in Illustrator
- Layer Power Moves
- Advanced Artboard & Pages Tricks
- How to Unlink vs Embedded Images
- How to Crop Images Rather than Mask
- How to Mask Inside Text & Multiple Shapes
- How to you use the Puppet Warp Tool
- How to use the Distort Envelope Shape & Type
- How to use the Envelope Mesh
- How to blend lines together
- How to make a Linocut Effect
- How to make 3D Gradient Lettering Blends
- How to spin text into a ring
- How to turn text into a 3D donut shape
- How to make a Duotone image effect
- How to make a Roughen Stamp Vector Effect
- How to make a Neon Sign Glow Effect
- How to use a Halftone Effect using Plugins
- Advanced Exporting Assets Tricks in Illustrator
- How to use the Dimension Tool

So what're you waiting for? Let's start the course now!
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

How to earn your certificate

Work your way towards your certificate for this course by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz (Merit level courses only)
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project (Distinction level courses only) - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Request your certificate when you've completed the requirements for the certificate level you're working towards

Good luck!

Pass certificates

We’re awarding ‘Pass’ level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your ‘Pass’ certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Don’t forget to request your certificate when all your projects are complete

Good luck!

Merit certificates

We’re awarding ‘Merit’ level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your ‘Merit’ certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz
  • Don’t forget to request your certificate when you have passed the quiz and completed all your projects

Good luck!

Distinction certificates

We're awarding 'Distinction' level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your 'Distinction' certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Don't forget to request your certificate when you have passed the quiz and completed all your projects

Good luck!

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hello. Hey, we are going to, uh, create this kind  of duo tone looking effect. We're also gonna add this kind of like, uh,  newspaper halftone effect as well. We're gonna start with this image here. We're gonna round trip to Photoshop, which is cool. I'll show you how to do things like RA rising vector  to speed things up.

I love this exercise and a lot of these effects exercises  because there's not really any new skills. They're just combining them all in uh, ways we haven't done  before to do cool effects. It's fun time. We've got all the skills. Let's stack 'em together  and in this case, make our cool duotone. All right, let's jump in.

Right? To get started, uh, I've got a file called Duo Tone Open. Okay, from your exercise files. Now it's just a color background. I've also got some sneaky texts hanging out there. Um, don't really need it.

One thing you need to make sure is  that it is a RGB document. Some of the things we're gonna do needs to be RGB, not CMYK. I can tell mine is RGB 'cause it's up in this tab here. If you wanna change it, you can go to file, go down to  document color setup and make sure it's on RGB. Alright, let's bring in an image. Come on.

Shift P Control shift P on a pc. And in your exercise files there's an image  folder and there's one in here. I'm looking for Cathedral of Holy Trinity. There's one with no Sky  and this one, this is the one I want. Okay, the jp, check it out. It is a very cool photograph  and it is of a church that I visited recently in Waterford.

Oh, I love it all Cathedral. So cool. Um, I love the angle of it as well. Um, so with it selected, we can bring it in. Okay? And I can drag it out to match the edges.

Okay? And I can keep going like this,  but there's this kind of like information in the sky  that I want to get rid of. You saw at the beginning it kind  of had this nice blank area here in just the building. So, um, kind of gives me a chance  to explain like there's times  where actually Illustrator just can't do everything. You need to go out to something like InDesign or Illustrator  or After Effects, depending on what you want to do. In this case, removing the sky is oh, easy in Photoshop.

I'm gonna give you a quick little round trip for that one. So with it selected, there's an option  that says edit in Photoshop  or where is, it's up the top there or it's under edit. Edit in Photoshop. Okay. And I've got it in Photoshop now. And what I want to do is I want to go to Select Sky.

There's just really cool things like this in um, Photoshop. Okay? And if I hit this little mask option, it's kind  of the opposite of what I want mask. So it's select the guy. So I've undone that. So what I can do is see this option here.

It says, uh, flip selection, then hit the mask option. Cool. Huh? Just super duper easy. The only trouble with what I'm gonna do now is  that it was a jpeg so that uh, if I save over the top  of it now it says you can't be a  JP 'cause you've got transparency. I can save it as a p and g,  which allows for that transparency.

Or you might just save it as a Photoshop document. There's no reason why it has to be a p and g. It can be a Photoshop document. Working between Illustrator and Photoshop works great. So I'm gonna put this one in here  and call it No sky, uh, no sky. And that'll be ready for you if you're like,  I don't wanna go to Photoshop.

Okay. Or you don't have it,  you can just start with this file. Cool. So I'm gonna save that and bring it  Into Illustrator. Alright, because we ended up changing the name of it. We can't just, it doesn't just update, we're gonna have  to bring it in again, but we can do some tricks.

Let's go you and go the little linking icon. Okay? And in here you can say Relink. So let's relink. Okay? And let's find that one with no sky.

Now if it's the right size  and the right shape, it should just update. Awesome. Alright, let's make it kind of duo color first. I'm gonna stick it to the bottom is  there's a couple of ways of doing it. Uh, image trace. We'll use the image trace over here.

Okay? And there is like a three color option, okay? And it's, it's lost a lot of detail. If I go to these options here for it, you can say,  all right, what does one color look like? And it kind, it actually goes two color black and white. It has to have those two colors at bare minimum at least.

And you're like me, it's not quite what I was looking for. So what I find a good result is under um,  presets go to gray scale. 'cause shades of gray actually, sorry, shades  of gray is still only one color. It's black, okay? But there's shades of  that black if you forget what I mean. So it is just one color mixed  with the other color of the pink.

The other thing I wanna do is probably,  there's two ways we can do it. You see ignore color is switched off for the moment. It says, uh, can only be done when you set  to this create cutout. Okay? Then we can do this. So give it a sec to rejigger all.

Okay, let's go to ignore color  and hopefully it should actually, is this gonna work? Let's see. Together it work. Perfect. Nice. You can leave that off  and just delete the white um, sky afterwards.

But it's gonna work for me. It's gonna expand, okay? And it's this kinda like super duper really detailed,  you know, church, but it's gonna allow us  to use the recolor. So I'm gonna select it all. I'm gonna go to Recolor  or go up to edit recolor artwork. So in Recolor, okay, what we're gonna do is we're gonna jump  to advanced options.

I go into here very often. It can be, hmm,  quite confusing in here. And what we're gonna do though is  we're gonna just use it quite simply. We're gonna say grab the colors instead of auto,  let's just pick one color please. And of the one color I find using these down the bottom. Okay?

And what I'm gonna start  with is grab the saturation up  to whatever you need it to be. Okay? I am gonna crank it all the way up  and then play with this hue slider. Okay? To get the color that I want,  you can double click it to type it in. If you've got like a brand color that you wanna be using,  I'm kind of just guessing mine.

I want this kind of like purpley color, maybe darker up  to you what you think gonna work with it. We're gonna play around, let's click. Okay. It is hard to see what's going on. Who remembers the shortcut to get rid of hide all the edges. It's hold something down and hit H stand.

That's where you go smash all the keys on your  keyboard and you're like, which one is it? It's command H on a Mac, CTRL H on a pc just hides all  that kind of like lines everywhere. I find I turn that on and off all the time,  but I always forget next time I open up the program  to turn it off again. I'm like, where has all my lines gone anyway,  if I mention it enough, you'll remember too. Let's click on a capacity, we've got selected capacity  and just work your way through. Like what is gonna kind of work nicely  with the image that I've got.

Okay, I already had a play with this  and I quite liked darken  and this is where I might go back into  Recolor, okay? And have  To spend a bit of time picking, you know,  'cause it's changed it quite a bit. So now I can go through  and say, actually I want this to be one color  and I want to play around with, you know, is it darker? Is it more saturated? Okay, which color is it? Now depending on your machine,  you might find your machine is struggling.

Like it's cool that this is Vector. I love it, okay? Because it's scalable forever. But there are times where it's like it's killing my machine. I'm passing it on to somebody in the office  and it's killing their machine. What we might do is just quickly, uh,  show you a little thing you can do.

So you can say object. I would like to rasterize this thing. So we did it right, it was raster,  which is all the pixels from Photoshop when it was  its original cathedral. And then we went, all right, let's uh, turn it into vectors. We can do this color thing. And now  we're going back to Rasta.

Okay? Uh, raster just means back to pixels. I'm gonna make sure the resolution's nice and high,  but your machine will be able  to hack this a whole lot better than sometimes loads  and loads and loads of different paths  and points when it is vector. So you could decide this is not essential,  it loses its blending mode when you do that. So let's go back into here and go in and prick darken again. Where are you?

Darken, darken. Darken. Okay. Alright, the next thing I wanna do is add that kind  of half tone, that kind  of like newspaper print looking effect. And this doesn't matter if you're doing it with the um, uh,  vector version or this ra rise version, it'll work the same. Let's go up with it selected.

It's got up to effect. Let's go down to pixelate. Let's go to this one called color half tone. Okay, shame for some reason there's no preview. Okay? So there's just click okay first of all and it's cool there.

I love that kind of like uh,  offset newspaper printing type thing. But I'm gonna undo, actually it's in effect,  you don't have to undo it. It's an effect that is applied. Okay? So you can open it back up again here in the properties  panel and then just mess around with like what looks cool. Let's try four.

Um, pixel radius, okay. Gives you a bit more, you know, less blobby. Okay? But still I love the kind of like little offset parts  that are all part of that. So there you go. Um, the last thing we're gonna do is bring the text over.

Okay. So I've got some text going on on my one  and I'm gonna have to make sure  that my text is at the front, okay. And that's the kind of vibe we were going for. There we go. I got two column background thing. Can you see in the background there?

Mine's gone a  bit weird around this. If I zoom in, zoom out, you see it went away. Sometimes it happens some effects. It just had like a color bar down the bottom there. It just went away when I have different zoom levels. Okay, there you go.

Magic. Alright, that is a kind  of a duo tone effect plus some other cool things like izing  images and the little half tone thing going on. Plus we round tripped from Photoshop,  tying all the skills together. Skills stacking. Alright, I hope you found that useful. I will see you in the next video.
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