Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you
how to create an SVG file from a PNG or JPG file in Adobe Photoshop. One thing to
know is you'll need an extension for this, and it's called Pathfinder for Photoshop, and it's
free with your Creative Cloud subscription. I also want to say that this is not the best
case scenario for creating SVG files. Your best bet is to use Adobe Illustrator for that which,
in that program, you have a lot more control over anchor points and paths. Here in Photoshop,
you're really limited, but I get that you might not be comfortable with Illustrator,
or maybe Photoshop is all you have. So anyway, let's get started. Okay, so the first thing I'm
going to do is get my JPEG into Photoshop. And so I'll just drag it down onto my Photoshop icon.
Now your best bet is to start with a pretty high quality resolution, large JPG or PNG file, because
this process will work so much better. Okay, so I've got my design open, I got this from Vecteezy,
which actually gives you vector files. But I didn't want to use a Google image because
those are usually copyrighted. So I'm just using the JPEG that I downloaded from Vecteezy for this
tutorial. Now, if you have colors that are pretty similar to each other, you're going to want to
pull up your levels. And that's CMD L or CTRL L. And then you can just bring this slider over to
the left to darken some colors, and then bring the middle slider even further over. So it's
nice to have a really high contrast image. That's what works well with selections. So we'll say OK.
So I hit W on my keyboard to get to my Magic Wand tool right over here. And then I'm just
going to click once. Now this is giving me a pretty good selection of the darker red area,
and that's what I want. If it's selecting too much or too little, you can mess with the tolerance,
which is right up here. I don't want Photoshop to try to guess what a circle looks like,
so I'm going to add that circle later. So I don't need it to give me a vector of that. So
I'm going to come up here to the Selection tool, hold SHIFT and draw around that inner circle.
So the only thing I have selected is this whole shape. Now I'm going to open my Paths palette.
If you don't have your Paths Window open or any of these other windows, you can come up here to
Window and find them here, here's Paths. And now I'm going to come down here and go to this
little icon right here, which will make a work path from the selection. So I'll click this.
You can see that Photoshop did a pretty good job of trying to make a vector from the selection,
I'm going to get on my Layers panel and just pull this out.
And then I'll come up here to Layer, New Fill layer and Solid Color.
So this is going to give us a new layer that's a vector layer. I'll just leave the name alone,
and I'll say OK, and it automatically recolors for us. So I'm going to choose a new color for it.
That looks good. And we'll say OK. Now I'll hide this one. Now, because we already have vector
shapes here in Photoshop, I'm going to come down here to my Ellipse tool, which is underneath your
Rectangle tool. And I'll just draw these in. I'm holding SHIFT to get a perfect circle.
I'll get back on my Selection tool and use my arrow keys to just arrow it into place.
In my Properties panel, I can change the color. So I'll come down here to the shape details,
I'm going to click over here, and I think I'll get kind of a lighter pink color. That one looks good.
So that's already made the layer. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this layer by holding OPTION
or ALT and then just clicking and dragging to make a copy. I'm going to hide the lower layer,
and then I'll click the top layer and hit CMD T or CTRL T on my keyboard. Then I'll get on a corner
and hold OPTION or ALT and just resize it from the middle. You might need to hold SHIFT to make that
proportional too, by the way. Okay, so we now have another ellipse. I need to get my properties back
up so I can change the color of this one. But first I'll need to hit Enter or Return,
then I'll change the color, we'll make this one white. All right, I'm going to hide that.
Now all we have left to make is the stem. So to do that, I'm going to get back on my background
layer. And I'll hit W to get my Magic Wand tool. I'll click once in there and there are actually
two colors here. But I want it all to be one piece. So I've got it all selected, I'll come
down here to the past panel and then choose Make Work Path again. And when we zoom in here,
you can see that it doesn't do a great job in this situation. So I'm going to undo that with CMD Z.
We can also change our tolerance here. So I'm going to come over here to the little flyout
and choose Make Work Path with the three dots beside it. And that will bring us our tolerance
dialog box. I've got it set to 2, but I think I'm going to go to .5, which is the lowest it'll go,
and we'll say, OK. Now you'll notice that follows the path a lot better,
but it's added a lot of unnecessary anchor points or nodes, so I want to undo that. And
I think the best bet for this is to just draw this with the pen tool. So I'm going to hit
P on my keyboard to get to my Pen tool right over here. And I'm going to click right here,
I'll get all the way down to the bottom and then just click and drag to make it match that side.
I'll hold OPTION and click this point to start a new direction. And we'll come back up here
to the very top. I'm going to use my arrow keys to move this over a little bit.
and hold ALT or OPTION to get rid of that handle and then complete the shape. So now we have our
work path over here. So we'll come back up to Layer, do New Fill Layer and Solid Color.
And we'll say OK. Now I'm going to choose a green color. Okay, now I'm going to do one of these
leaves. I'll start a new layer. and then I'll hit P on my keyboard to get my Pen tool. I'll click
once in the stem. I want to make sure that overlaps the stem. And then I'll click right about
here, click and drag to get a nice curve. And then I'll hold OPTION or ALT and click this node
so that we can start a new direction without a handle, click up here and pull it out until
it matches that and do the same thing: OPTION or ALT, and click the last point.
We'll go ahead and do this one too: OPTION or ALT and then we'll finish the shape.
And now I'll go ahead and make a New Fill Layer and Solid Color. And I'm just going to sample this
color so it's the same. We'll say OK. I'm going to duplicate this layer, so I'll click on it and just
drag it down to the plus icon. And now I've got a duplicate, now I'll just click and drag this down
here. And I'll hit CMD T, or CTRL T to just resize it. And I'll do the same with the other one.
Okay, so I've got three leaves on the right, now I need my three leaves on the left. So that is
these three layers. So I'm going to hold SHIFT and select them all, then I'll copy all of them.
And I'll hit CMD T or CTRL T, come up here to Edit > Transform and Flip Horizontal,
then we can just move these over into place over here. I'm going to make them a little bit bigger,
I'll get on a corner and then I'm going to hold CMD on a Mac or CTRL on a PC
to distort this. So that matches a little better, I'm going to get on this leaf, hit CMD T,
and just make it a little bit bigger. And now we'll CMD minus to zoom out, or CTRL minus on a
PC. Okay, so we have all of our color fills. If I hide the background, I can see them all very well.
Now we can select all of these and hit CMD E or CTRL E to combine them all into one shape.
But when we do that, we get this little strange crossover thing here.
And we don't want that. So I'm going to undo that. So this is where we need the extension. To get
that I'm going to come out here to Google Chrome, and the name of it is Pathfinder for Photoshop.
This link is in my description below. And you'll want to install. It'll make you open your Creative
Cloud desktop app. Then you can go to Marketplace and manage plugins, and you can install it here.
Once you have it installed, you'll need to restart Photoshop. So go ahead and save this
as a PSD file. So we'll go ahead and save this as Flower.psd which is Photoshop.
We'll replace that other one in there, and then you'll want to quit and restart. Okay, so I'm
back here in Photoshop, I've got my Flower.psd open. I'm going to select all of those color fills
that make up the stem. And then I'll come up to Window > Extensions, and Pathfinder.
And now just choose this first one. And if we zoom in, you can see that this is now one
path instead of a lot of different paths. I'm going to turn on all my layers again,
and then I'm going to throw away the background. So now we have four vector layers on a transparent
background. So I'm going to come up here and export as an SVG. I'll go to File > Export >
Export as I'm going to choose SVG here. The rest of this looks pretty good. So we'll say Export.
And I'll put it right here in the same spot. And that's it. So now it's an SVG file. I'm going to
go ahead and open Cricut Design Space. Cricut is a cutting machine, and it's very popular. So
I'm thinking some of you who watch this video are going to want to be making SVG files for Cricut.
So we can go to New Project, go to Upload, and then we'll upload our SVG. Now, here's the weird
thing. If you bring this file from Photoshop, it most likely is going to be all black like this.
But that's okay, we can still upload, click on it, and Insert images. And then you can see we have
four different layers here. So I'm going to ungroup these and then I'm going to recolor them
and now we can go ahead and cut this with our Cricut machine by hitting Make It.
All right, if you liked this video, please click on the Like button.
And I'll see you in a couple days with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!