How to use the Smooth Tool in Illustrator

Hi everyone. In this video we'll look at the smoothing  operation in Illustrator. We'll also look at the smooth tool. Take us out. Ooh, look, we can kind of just simplify  and smooth things out really easily from this, uh,  little hand drawing we've done. Alright, let's jump in  and look at the smoothing options in Illustrator.

First up, open up the file called Smooth ai. Okay. And we'll look at a couple of different use cases. So, um, this one here I just drew with the pencil tool kind  of came out how I want, I kind of did it on purpose  that it's a bit scraggly  and a bit not quite as smooth as I'd hoped. Um, so we're gonna click on it, just this leaf part  with the black arrow and we're gonna go up to, uh, object. We're gonna go down to Path  and there's this one in here called Smooth.

Okay. So click on smooth  and often if you click on this option here, auto smooth,  it'll get you pretty close. It doesn't, in this case, it's, it's kind of guessed here  and it's kind of like it doesn't know  that it's meant to be a leak with all. It's kind of like little bits of subtlety. Okay? So, um, this is how it started.

Okay? And watch, I can just kind of crank it up  until I feel like it just, you know, it depends  what you want but like I can just take away,  can you see it just gets rid of all  that awkwardness of my drawing. Okay. It might be somebody else's one,  it might be something generated from ai. The smooth option is just really nice just to kind of,  you know, average things out and smooth things out. Obviously I do it for lines as well.

If I've got a line that just needs to be, you know,  if I click on the um, direct selection tool,  you can see there's just too many anchor points  trying to do too much. Okay, so I'm gonna go back to my object. I'm gonna go to Path and I'm going to go too smooth. Okay? And you can hit the uh, auto  and like in this case it's not doing a great job,  but don't underestimate it. Lots of jobs that I've done, I can't think of anything now.

I hit auto smooth and it works out great. Okay, so can you see the line just kind of you decide on  how March of the kind  of roughness you wanna smooth out and you can decide there. I'm just clicking and dragging it. Now another really good use case is  I've got this drawing in my book. I found it, I'd have no idea what I did it for. It's meant to be a skull.

Okay? So I hand drew it and I need to turn it into a vector. Okay? We've done live chasing the essentials course. We'll just do a quick refresher. It's not really about live traces,  it's about smoothing it afterwards.

And I find I use this quite a lot for my hand drawn stuff. So let's go to Image Trace. Okay, let's click okay. And it's gonna just default to something  that's close enough. What I might do just to simplify things is um,  in your properties panel, if the text of vector is open,  you might close it up just 'cause it's so big. And down the bottom here is live trace.

And we're gonna go to, instead of going  to the different presets, okay, we are going to go  to this option here, okay? Get the panel open, the big ugly panel. Okay, so yours might be toggled down. Toggled up, okay,  what I'm gonna do is work out the threshold. It's, it's done a pretty good job. Basically the threshold is how much like, uh,  how black does it need to be to be included?

Okay? Do all the light marks get included? What's the threshold if you have it right  up, it includes everything. And if you  Have it quite low, it only gets really, really black bits. Okay? And I was using a Sharpie to color it in  and it got quite light there.

So finding the happy medium, kind of wanted  to back to how they had it. Now we could spend a long time tidying this up, okay? I want the past to be low, the corners to probably be low. I want uh, less noise. So I want to crank it up, try to get rid  of some of the dots in the middle. And the last thing I wanna do is I wanna say actually in  here I want to ignore the background color.

Okay? If I use this eyedrop a tool to say this color,  I want you to just not include it. I don't want a white background in this. 'cause with it off, let's turn that off. Watch this. I can move this out and it has a white background,  but if I say ignore that color,  can you see it gets rid of it?

That's fancy. Cool. So I'm happy enough with this. Don't worry too much. If yours looks exactly like mine  or is not, it's more about the principle. Okay?

So I'm gonna say expand this. Now I click off in the background. You might end up with some junk around here. You might need to delete. I got lucky and I don't, okay,  but if I select on this now, okay, I want to use  that simplify 'cause it's kind of what I wanted, right? It's just a bit, it was better in my head  and I want it to be smoothed out.

So with it selected, let's go to object, let's go to path  and let's go to the smooth. Okay? And smooth again, you can hit automatic  and I'm gonna grab this little  bar 'cause it's always in the way. Grab that little dotted thing to drag it out the way is, oh,  it's not quite what I wanted. Okay? So you gotta find this happy medium of,  that's quite a cool transition, isn't it?

Oh, what is that? That looks like Bella. Clever. I don't know, minion. Um, but I'm gonna try  and find some happy medium of like that's how it was  and then keep going up until I'm like, ah, that's it. Just smooth everything else out.

Nice. So the live trace, uh, tied in with the smoothing option,  okay, I find really handy to get, I dunno,  get the results I want at least tidy up some of the points  and you'll find after it's been smooth. If I click off in the background and I grab my direct  selection tool, the A key, I only have a few anchor points. It cuts them down when it's smoothing out  and blends them around so they're nice and smooth. So I find I've got better control afterwards as well. Okay?

If I do want to go and edit it. The other thing you might do is this one over here is we've  used like a kind of a global smooth, okay,  sometimes you just wanna do a little bit  because that's quite nice, that's quite nice. This bit here is a bit rougher than the rest of it. So with it selected, um, over here  underneath your shaper tool, pencil tool, hold it down. There should be one called the Smooth tool. And this does the same thing except that it is a brush.

Okay, there you can apply it. And this one here,  I'm just gonna kind of like brush across this. Okay? And you can see it's removing anchor points  and tidying them up and smoothing them out. Okay? You can go too far,  but I find it's kind of like, uh, you know,  a little bit more specific on an area rather  than doing the whole thing.

So a bit of both. There you go. Smoothing stuff in Illustrator. Either using the object path, smooth function,  or using the Smoother tool. Alright, that's it. I will see you in the next video.