Hello and welcome to the plugins video. What is a plugin? A plugin is something that you can add  to Illustrator from generally third parties outside of Adobe  that makes special tools for Illustrator. There are lots of them. I'll show you where to get them  and we'll run through just one of them in this tutorial. Just to give you an experience of like installing one  and what their potential benefits are.

I'm gonna show you my favorite one. It's from a company called Astute Graphics. They make cool plugins and there are cool people over there. Shout out, uh, Kim Callen. They do many plugins. The one I'm gonna show you is doing this kind  of like half tone effect,  makes things really cool, adds dots to stuff.

Also give you a quick demo of another one here. We'll use the graphic and the stipple effect. It's very cool. Alright, let's jump in now  to find plugins in general. Okay? The best place is probably the exchange,  so exchange adobe.com.

Okay. I went to Creative Cloud plugins. I went to Illustrator and there is a lot to have a look at. Um, the one I'm gonna demo today is from Astute Graphics. Okay? So Stute Graphics make a bunch of different plugins.

Uh, the ones I'm gonna show you today are paid. Um, there is a free trial if you do wanna follow along,  you can use the link here on screen. They all install relatively the same. Okay? Any of the plugins, you kind of click them, download them,  restart, illustrator, and they magically appear. Now to get started, if you are following along, open up uh,  plugins from your exercise files  and creepy, Dans waiting  for you like the effects I'm gonna show you in this one man.

But it's just an example of what plugins, uh, you know,  what a powerful plugin can do for you in terms  of time saving and the effects  that you just can't do inside of Illustrator. Okay? The one I'm gonna show you is both good  for images and vector. So we'll do a bit of both and yeah, let's get started. I'll show you some cool half tone effects. So with this image selected, I think you have  to have the image embedded,  but we know how to do that, okay?

And we're gonna go to effects. And down the bottom here, I'm gonna show you this one here  called Phantasm and it's got lots of different options  and I'm just gonna show you one  'cause I'm like I can't do this would be super long video. It's already, I know gonna be too long. But let's have a little run through of say half tone. I love the half tone effect. How cool is that?

Now the one thing you will find is some of the effects. There is a half tone under. Let's click okay, let's go to effects. There is a half tone under Photoshop  and there's one under pixelate. The only problem is this color half tone. There's not a lot of control.

Let's give it a demo. You effect, um, pixelate  and half tone is  that there's not a lot of control here, okay? You can kind of bump it around a little bit. And the output unfortunately is pixels. So not vector. Can you see the little um, pixels?

Okay, it's a rust image. So okay  but not great plus not  the cool effect that I was looking for. So that's the kind of standard uh, half tone effect. Let's have a look at this one here. Let's go back to effect. Let's go to fm.

Let's go to half tone. And now the main things in this particular um,  plugin I find is nice work around monochrome and sampled. Sampled is from the actual image. It's using sampled colors from the image  or kind of monochrome  depending on what you're looking to do. Um, the other one is what kind of pattern it is. Okay?

Is it a grid, FM or radial? Okay. Or give you different looks. Okay? And the DPI, how many these dots are in an inch, okay? And the higher, the more dense it is,  the lower the kind of simpler it is.

And you might find, okay, mine's kind of keeping up. You see a low DPI makes the computer run a bit faster  and if you crank it right up to something high 20,  it's gonna say, Hey, it's gonna take a long time. I'm gonna say proceed. It's cool. A let's click okay, zoom in. A couple of things with this particular uh, plugin  that I like is with it selected can go to object  and expand appearance to kind of get rid of any effects.

Okay? And it's all, if I go command y,  CTRL YA pc, look at that. It's all glorious vector. I do like it. Uh, I'm gonna undo. So my effect comes back.

And the other thing to know about this uh, plugin is  with it selected, can you see it's over here,  it's kind of editable afterwards. You can click on it and it will reopen up  the um, dialogue box. So you can go and make changes to it. And what I find really useful  is, let's clear account this one. Let's do this guy. Um, I'm not sure which is more creepy.

Probably this guy. My serious face. Okay, with it selected, we are gonna go to effects. We're gonna go to fm. Let's go to Halftone again is there's a  lot of control in here. I'm not gonna go through it all, but I  do like playing around with it.

What a good starting point is. Can you see this like a little thing over here? Okay, under sittings manager,  there's one's kind of built into it. So I like abstract check how cool that is. Let's crank it up a little bit. Oh, DAF punk Dan.

Okay, I'm gonna click okay, let's look at just a couple  of the other presets just 'cause I'm excitable. Uh, let's go to Fantasm. Let's go half tone. I'm just gonna actually jump through these. Let's have a look. So dot metrics.

Anybody have that printer back in the day  made the big grinding noise printer. We had one at our house, it was awesome. What else have we got? Actually I'm gonna close this  and reopen it on a few different images. You wait there and I'll just do some jump cuts. This is another interesting one that is inside the uh,  half tone is I use this one here called quick brown fox  and basically it switches the dots out for text.

See the dot characteristics instead of being like round,  okay, you can pick character  and under options I can say BYOL. Okay? And I can click okay  and it's using the sampled color from my image. Okay? 'cause monochrome doesn't quite work. Um, but, and it's sampling the color  and mixing with the text.

You can see what's going on. It's very cool. I do love me a good plugin, especially when it does a lot  of the heavy work of something or an idea that I have. I do like doing that kind of half tone effect  to just chunks of the drawing. So I've got this chunk here. I'm gonna ungroup this, grab that bit and I'm gonna copy it  and paste it in front.

So remember copy  and then command F on a Mac, control F on a pc. So I've got two versions on top. The top one here. I'm gonna change the color. I'm gonna say just make it a bit  uh, brighter and less saturated. Okay?

Just so it's kind of like on the top. So get what I've done just on the top. Then I can go effect  and just do that half tone to just part of it just  to enhance it, you know, just kind of like whoa,  even black is cool. Okay? But remember type we can go sample. So it's gonna use the color that we had selected as the dots  and then you can just play around with  how much DPI you want to use.

I actually wanna go less. Do love that effect. I love how the dots kind of wash out near the edges there. The other thing you can do with half tone is you  can start with a gradient. We did a flat color, so  what we can do is on the whale here we can say I'm gonna  copy and paste in front again. So I've got two versions of it.

Uh, the top one here, I'm going to add a gradient  to G key on my keyboard. Click and drag. Click once actually and then decide. We can decide afterwards which way the gradients gonna go. Let's start with I know something like that. And then with it selected with the black arrow go up  to effect, go to half tone and go on.

Now I'm gonna mess around with mine  and say actually I want a color  and I'm gonna pick, I know some sort of dark green thoughts,  I'm gonna lower it down a bit. And then the cool thing about it,  'cause it's an active effect, you can go to your GK again  and just go, actually I'm gonna drag this bit further along  or around different way and get it kinda sense of it. Oh that is cool. Okay, once you kind of got it, you're like awesome. Actually no actually probably a bit further out like that. Do the same thing down here again.

Go copy and paste in front. Then I'm gonna use my eyedropper tool  to steal the graphic from there  to steal the style and color from that one. And I guess that's where the power  of any old plugin is useful. You know, it's that kind of like be able to do something  repetitively, consistently, quickly. Lemme show you just one more, uh, useful one from Astute. Let's go to effects.

Um,  this is our donut plane from earlier. It has a very text effect look, right? So what I'm gonna do is click just the background  and I'm gonna go to effects. I'm gonna go to this one called Text reno. Got one called texture and I really like it for, yeah,  adding a bit of like Photoshop ness. Grunge ness is typically a flat vector  but retaining the victimness of it, that's the key.

And it's a good example of how different this one works. Okay, so this one here, we are allowed to say, alright,  I want to add noise, I want to add a second texture of,  I don't know, fine specs. And you can hit plus and add it to it. I'm gonna undo that. So I've got noise applied  and you've got this like little triangle thing here  and you can kind of slide it in to kind of lower,  like shrink the texture  and you can play around with different blending modes. I've kind of built it into this little app here,  rather than using opacity like we did earlier.

It's gonna find one I like overlay. Looks cool. You can see with just a couple of clicks we've gone  and I'm gonna close down texture. We've gone and removed or gone and changed. You know what is quite a, it's got, you know, it's got  that noisy kind of stipple look to it now,  but it's still uh, vector. Actually there is a stipple one  actually let's do it to the plane.

Let's go to effect. There is one called STI bullism. Okay? And go to stipple. Stipple is kind of like half tone except  that it doesn't have the kind of faded dots. It's just kind of like, looks like somebody attacked it  with a ballpoint pin.

So let's turn preview on  and you know, sometimes you're like, huh,  but when you end up playing with it for a little while,  I'm gonna go up to what? 80% I do like it when it's sampling the object. Oh, instantly look how cool that is. Play around with the dot size. There's lots you can do in all. Actually let's go down to four.

That's  The one, the one I played around with and click okay. You can see how quickly it goes from being quite the um,  vector AI generated image  to something quite, I don't know, special. We call it special. I do like it. So if you do wanna play around with the Astute Graphics one,  uh, use the link on the screen here. I'm an affiliate for them.

So if you do end up moving on  to a paid account, I get a small cut of that. But I wanted to show you a kind of a plugins video mainly  to show you there's, there's just other things illustrator  can do when you bolt on other people's plugins. You saw how quickly, like especially this donut plane here,  how we got from kind of something  to something quite special quite quickly. So don't feel constrained about following some online  tutorial where there's like one bazillion effects to go  through and you add 10 of them to it  and you get something quite different from  the tutorial creator. 'cause their image was different, the size was different. Okay?

Uh, sometimes there might be a plugin  that'll just super duper help. Alright, that's it. We're all gonna pretend we never saw  this guy or that guy. Okay, and move on to the next video by creepy Dans.