Creating a Silhouette in Illustrator

Go File>Place and place the photo on the artboard. Select the photo and click Live Trace (its on the tool bar right above the art board). Simple Trace will be selected as default for the trace. You will notice that there are 2 problems with the trace. First, the darker tones of background sky is being traced and secondly, the hands of the girls are missing. Click the Options icon (the square button) beside Preset and try adjusting the Threshold settings. You will realize that this can’t be fixed with it.

1. Isolate the Background to White The way to solve this is to make the background white. This will will give you a better trace. Open up the photo in Photoshop. Open a new file that is letter sized, just like in Illustrator. Place it the same way.

Find the quick selection tool. It’s the 4 th tool down on the tools palette. You may now change your brush size. Click in the area surrounding the jumping people until it has lines all around it like this. Please note- it won’t be perfect your first time. You will need to zoom in, and use the quick selection tool that way. You can make your brush size smaller now as well, until it’s perfect. VERY IMPORTANT: It will be tricky around the hands. If you hold option while using the Quick Selection Tool, you can click on the hands and have them rejoin the arms. You’ll be able to tell by the dashing lines around the body… like in the photo in the next slide.

Next, you will need to right click (or use two fingers) and click on the picture. Click “Select Inverse.” Next, click “Refine Edges.” A window should pop up. Before you hit ok, go down to the bottom and click “Decontaminate Colors.” This will remove the background. Click ok. If you missed some of the people (I did), undo what you just did. Go back and use the Quick Selection Tool and repeat the process to remove the background until you have the hands and all body parts connected.

Once you have this as your image, we are one final step away in Photoshop.

We will need to darken to photo to remove all the details on the t-shirt to get a perfect black silhouette. Go to Image>Adjustments>Levels and drag the midtone color to the far right. Please note-> I dragged the middle “triangle” to the far right.

Click on Save As- save it as a Jpeg, not a.psd. Make sure you rename it something like “Edited Original Photo.”

Now, select Live Trace again for the photo and you can instantly see the difference

Picture on Next Slide Open up the Tracing Options again to tweak the trace. Increase the Threshold to 200 to remove the white areas on the girl. I have also increased the blur to 0.2px to smooth the edges. Also check Ignore White to remove the white background from the trace. Experiment with other settings to see which settings give the best results. Again, Tracing Options is found in the Square Box before it says Threshold.

Explanation of each features for Live Trace. Preset – Preset contains a set of settings for some common traced effect. It is a good place to start to see which settings gives you the best effect before you tweak the others. Mode – Choose you color settings (black and white, grayscale or color) Threshold – The value to separate black to white. Lighter pixels are converted to white and darker pixels are converted to black. Palette – Choose automatic color selection or you can define your own color palette. Max Colors – Maximum amount of colors used to define the palette. Output to Swatches – Save your color palette to swatches. Blur – Amount of gaussian blur applied to your image. Higher value will smooth out edges.

Resample – Changes the resolution of the image. Set it lower to speed up computer performances. Fills – Check to render Fill. Strokes – Check to render stroke. Max Stroke Weight – Specifies that anything larger than this value will be considered a fill. Min Stroke Length – The minimum size of a stroke allowed. Path Fitting – Lower values create tighter paths whereas higher values will create looser paths. Minimum Area – The smallest details to be traced. Corner Angle – The sharpness of the turn to be considered as an angle. Ignore White – Leave white fill as transparent. Preview – Toggle this to turn on live preview. Always turn it on to see your traced effect.

This is our final traced effect. There are some white areas on the first figure that needs to be cleaned up.

You can select the Blob Brush and paint over it to cover up the white areas. Just be sure to change the color of the brush to black… You may want to zoom in and change the Brush Size to make it look nice.

Here our final black vector silhouette. Now you can add in your Illustrator background effect.

To add the background, draw a square over the artboard. Make it whatever color you want. You probably lost your people- with the square still selected, click Object- Arrange-Send to Back. To play with the colors, click on Window-Transparency. Then click on on the gradient tab. You can use preselected color options… Just click beneath the bar line, and you can pick your color. If you click on an empty space, you can add more color. You can also slide the “color” squares beneath the line and change the effect.

Save as PDF. Upload to Google Docs. Should you finish early, try picking your Own picture to add a silhouette to. Tip:: pick a photo with a white background, or one with large contrast, So you can go in photoshop and remove the background the same as you did this photo.