Subtitles of the Movie

The trace tool allows you to trace an object like a photograph, a drawing that you imported or scanned from somewhere else. This is very handy for working with logos, other objects where you don't want to have the time or the talent or the energy to sit and try and draw it from scratch. Like for instance, some of these bugs I just couldn't draw from scratch. So what we are going to do is use the trace tool to see how close we can get to recreating that drawing. Now to start off with we have a plethora of options working with the trace tool. Go ahead and double click it, and holy smokes, look at what we have here. Let's try and run through these. We have first of all the color mode, which allows us to go anywhere from 2 colors up to 256 colors. This basically tells us how many colors you want to have in the final image. Ok, we can also choose work with grays. We can select if we want to work in RGB or CMYK colors. Resolution we can set high, normal or low. High resolution will set the trace tool to look at the most details of the image, give us the most detailed trace. Normal gives us to look for fewer details. And of course low will set the trace tool to look for the fewest details in the drawing or the photograph we are working with. Now obviously each of these will involve more memory or resources from your computer. So if you are working with a high resolution that's going to take a lot longer to draw or render. Ok, so leave that at normal. Now we will take a look at the path conversion. Path conversion will set the path for the tracing. Now if we use outline, that traces the outside border of the image and will create a series of closed filled paths. This is one of the more common ones to use and that's the one we are going to use here in a little bit. Centerline; centerline basically allows you to trace the center of the drawing strokes. This is handy if we have a picture or image that has a lot of lines but not a lot of filled in areas. Almost like a lithograph. Now if we go to centerline outline, combine centerline and outline paths and then outer edge traces only the outer edge of the drawing. Now let's go back here to outline. We also have path overlap, which controls how tightly we want to have our paths overlap. None, we don't worry about it, loose and tight. Now we also have trace conformity, which we can set to how close the trace tool will trace the objects, the original object. We can set this to very loosy-goosy all the way up to a very tight tolerance. Noise tolerance, this lets us eliminate any straight pixels, dirt, dust, anything that may have come in if it's a scanned image or a copy of a copy. This reduces or allows you to control how much stuff that you don't want in the drawing. Wand color tolerance lets us set a range of colors that the trace tool will recognize as one final color. Now for instance if we are working with web and we have a limited color palette, obviously I don't want to pick all the little subtle nuances here in this fly for color scheme. It just doesn't work. Ok now we are working for print, it's not as much of an issue. So let's go ahead and leave pretty much everything here as a default. I am going to select the dragonfly, our green dancer dragonfly. I am going to draw a marquee around the area I want to trace. Voila, I now have traced this object. Let's zoom in and take a look to see what we have. Now this puts the tracing on a layer on top and you can see, well it didn't quite pick up everything we wanted. We can go back and play with the settings for that and that's what you'll need to do when you are working with tracings. It is not a foolproof tool but it is a very handy tool and one that you will need to experiment with to find the right settings. That's a quick look at the trace tool.