Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to go over how to quickly change
the color of a transparent PNG file in Adobe Illustrator. And this is something you can do if
you just want to quickly change either a really low res PNG file or a simple PNG with just one
or two colors. So something like red to blue. This way is similar to using Photoshop, but if
you're on a plan where you don't have access to Photoshop, this could be a workaround for you.
And I would like to say you don't have a ton of control over the color changing. You just kind
of have to mess with it to get it to do what you want. Now if you have a really high res PNG file,
I made another video that shows how to use Image Trace to vectorize it and then recolor it that
way. And you'll be able to see it on your screen right up here. All right, let's get started.
Ok, so I'm here in Illustrator. I'm just going to come over here to Create new.
We'll come up here to Print and then Letter, and then we'll go to Create.
And the transparent PNG file that I want to change is this mountains image. It's mostly blue,
but I just want to change it to something else. So in Illustrator, I'll come up here to File
and then >Place, and I'm going to choose the MOUNTAINS one, and place that.
Now this is a pretty high res image that I downloaded from Vecteezy. So it looks really nice,
but the quality of your PNG file does not have to be that good. Ok, so the first thing we want to
do is open our Links panel. If you're not seeing Links, that'll be up here in Window. It's Links
right here. So you can see your PNG file in your Links panel. The first thing we need to do is
make sure it's embedded. And if it's embedded, it'll have a little picture right over here.
But this one is not embedded. So I'm going to come up here to the flyout and choose Embed images.
And now we can see that little image right here. Now with this still selected,
I'm going to come up here to Edit>Edit Colors,
and >Adjust Color Balance. I'm going to make sure Preview's checked down here,
and then we can kind of just move these sliders to get some different looks for our PNG file.
And I'm kind of liking this red color. So we'll say OK. I want to keep the size of
the PNG and the quality the same, so I'm going to come up here to Object and then >Artboards
and >Fit to Selected Art. So now the artboard is the same size as the PNG file. And we can go
up here to File>Export>Export As, and then we'll make sure it says PNG down here and Use Artboards.
And I'm going to call this one MOUNTAINS-02. We'll export that. I'm going to keep all this the same
and make sure this stays transparent. We'll say OK. So now if we come back out here to our Finder,
we've got our blue version with a transparent background, and our red version with a transparent
background. Now I'm just going to delete that, and I'm going to import a different file.
So we'll go to File>Place. I'm going to choose this hat this time. So we'll place this in here.
I'll click once, and that'll give us the 100% size. I'll come over to my Links, and I'll make
sure it's embedded, which it's not right now. And now it is. And then I'll go to Edit>Edit Colors
and >Adjust Color Balance. I'll make sure Preview is checked, and then I'll slide these around and
see what I can do here. Now because this is originally like a photograph, it's a little
hard to get Illustrator to color it correctly. So if you have access to Photoshop, you'll definitely
want to do this in there. It works so much better, and it's not so much of a guessing game.
When we use this in Illustrator, it tends to lose a lot of its shadows if you're not careful. Ok,
but let's say we're happy with this. We'll say OK, and then I'll go ahead and do the same thing,
Object>Artboards and >Fit to Selected Art. And we can export this as a transparent PNG.
Use Artboards, and we'll call this purepng2, and export that.
Everything else will stay the same. So now we have two different hat colors. And we don't have
quite as much detail on this red one. And it looks like this wasn't cut out very well to begin with.
We have kind of a bumpy edge, and we can see it a lot better than on this yellow version. We can
see that here but yeah, it's not great. Anyway, this is just a quick way of changing the color
on your PNG files. All right, if you liked this video and you want to see more videos like this,
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time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!