Hello. Hey, in this video we are going to take this colored image and switch it out to be a black and white image. And then we'll add some kind of color blending modes to build on the skills we've already learned. Hey, we'll take it a little bit further as well and kind of do the black and white image, but then add some other colors to it and try and get in a cool effect going. Um, but yeah, this is basically how to black and white images in Illustrator. There's a couple of things to be mindful of, mainly whether it's linked or embedded.
Let's jump in and I'll show you how to do it. Okay? Uh, it's play along. Open up black and white, oh one from your exercise files. Okay? Basically just an image behind some stuff.
So the first thing we wanna do is we want to with it selected, okay? We wanna make it black and white and it's easy. You go to edit, go to edit colors, and there's one in here called convert to gray Scale. Bam. And you might be going up there and going, Hey, that's not available 'cause it's grayed out. What ends up happening is images that you want to convert to black and white need to be what's called embedded in Illustrator.
What I mean by embedded is if I bring in an image, um, command shift p control shift P on a pc, I bring in from the exercise files black and white. O2. See this one linked with it linked, okay? It's gonna link and reference this image. It's not gonna do the black and white thing with a broken, it's called embedded, okay? And it's part of this file not linked to this and it will do, uh, the black and white thing.
So just make sure it's not linked. If you've imported it already, let me say let's import it, okay? And it's linked. And if you, let's have a look. Edit. Uh, let's go to edit colors.
Can you see, can't do a lot of stuff to it. We can embed it by selecting it down here at the moment. Can you see there's this like link image? Okay, I can click on that or I can go to my window and go to links. Open that up and this guy here is linked. This guy's not.
So that's that one. And this is the new one that I just imported. And what you can do is you can say with it selected, you my friend, are embedded. Thank you very much. Now with it selected, I should be able to go to edit, edit colors. Hey, and I can convert it to gray scale.
Okay, so let's do it to this guy. You edit gray scale. Now, uh, let me show you. So edit, edit colors, gray scale. So you kind of just left with whatever illustrator decides and it's pretty good. And what I end up doing is often doing my black and white and Photoshop.
And while it's not a Photoshop course, I want to kind of give you the quick run through and try and excite you for doing the illustrate. Sorry, Photoshop, either essentials or advanced course if you haven't already. So in Photoshop here it does the same thing. I've got the same file open, I go to adjustments. Okay? There is one in here called uh, no single adjustments.
Okay? And there's one in here called black and white. Is that one there? I think give it a click. You'll see it does a very similar thing. But the nice thing about it is you can decide afterwards what becomes black and white and how much is dark and how much is light.
Just demo it Dan. Okay, so the reds here, watch this. I left and right. You see everything that has any sort of red tone or tint to it in the video, you can control and make it darker or lighter. Okay? So it gives you a lot more control.
Okay? Yellows, there's a lot in his skin, so you might decide that you want it to be, uh, just a little bit darker. Greens, there is no greens in this entire image. Somehow there's a little bit in the edges, not really cyan, just in his pocket and on his, uh, arm patches. Okay? So you can see, you can kind of like play around with this to get it to be more of the black and white image that you thought it might be.
The other cool thing about the one in Photoshop is there is this thing called the uh, on art. Slider doesn't really have a name. It's this little finger with the arrows on it. You can click on it and say, actually I'm gonna grab his cheeks and click hold and drag a lift. And right, you can, instead of trying to work out what the sliders are, you can go, all right, this check here want to be darker or want the, you know, the fence to be darker or lighter. Okay?
You can work on, you know, click and drag on the artwork. You can also tint it, which is handy. Okay? Click on tint, pick a color, okay? And decide what you wanna do. Anyway, uh, if you are interested, you can check out my Photoshop Advanced or Photoshop essentials course.
And alright, so we've got at black and white. And what I find really cool is being able to kind of have this like monochrome image or just one with a simple tint and then grabbing this top color here. And we've done this before, right? I like going to opacity and going through and say, Ooh, darken or, I love this kind of interaction here. Um, especially with this kind of like blood red and you can work your way through more color blending modes. All right, which one?
I'm gonna go for color burn. Love it. Now when the image is black and white in the background, okay, I talked about not using black and white earlier on. Okay? Solid black and solid white and at least one of the two needs to be a color. This can be black and white or at least gray scale.
And then we can work on these colors in the top. If this was solid black, eh, it wouldn't work very well if it was solid white, not so well either, but because this is a lot of tonal range in here, we can do some cool stuff. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a duplicate of this art board. So shift O is the weird shortcut for the art board tool, okay? And we've got one art board. Let's duplicate it like we do a box.
Hold down the option key on a Mac alt, key on a PC and just drag it out. So we've got two of them. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna keep dragging it by clicking anywhere inside. Okay? Making sure in the art board tool, that's it there. Okay?
Um, just so I got a bit of space between them, it's tricky to do what I'm gonna do next when they're too close, close down the links panel. Gonna grab my black selection tool. I'm gonna grab this and I'm just gonna do, I'm gonna make some giant stripes, okay? Like I saw at the beginning there, just kind of rotate 'em around, make 'em big a little bit wider, okay? And the layer order here is important. Okay?
I want them behind this text here. So what I'm gonna do is have it selected and use my command but not shift and use square bracket. That doesn't work. It does and it kind of just moves it down at one level at a time. So I'm holding the commande down on a Mac control key on a PC and just hitting the first square racket. So go back one back one more.
You gotta kind of keep going until you're like, okay, it's just in front of the image and like we did before, let's go to opacity. Let's go to normal and find something that works for this. Cool. Huh? I love this. Oh that is cool.
What is that one? Uh, that one is color burn. Love it. Both of 'em are color burns and maybe this one here goes back to being normal. Okay, there we go. And to finish it off, I might go and grab my rectangle tool, which of course is the M key K and I'm gonna drag it out across the whole thing and try and crop this all in.
My image is a little bit big as well, so I'm gonna grab that on top, grab my V key for my section tool and try and hold shift and go a teeny tiny image down the bottom's gonna be hard to select. Uh, yep. How do I know? I kinda wiggle it around. I haven't got any of that. What I'm gonna do is use my black arrow and just drag a little bit across these.
Can you see what I'm doing there? This is the trick that I use often is I can kind of select that purple, that red and the image, but nothing else. I'm gonna shift, click and grab these two as well so we're all connected. Generally I give 'em a wiggle first to kind of go, all right, I'm doing it right, I'm gonna go command or control seven to mask it and then send it to the back. Okay? I'll promise that's it for shortcuts for for the layer order, you know them already.
Alright? Um, so yeah, black and white images. And the cool thing about black and white images is you can do some interesting stuff when you combine it with the things that we've learned earlier and with blending modes. I dunno, I find it spices up. Uh, yeah, spices up images and content. Alright, that is going to be it.
I will see you in the next video.