Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to use the Content
Aware Tracing tool in Adobe Photoshop. All right, let's get started. Okay, I'm here in Photoshop
2021, and by the way, this feature is only available in Photoshop 2021 and newer, and you'll
also have to restart Photoshop the first time you use it. So first, we have to turn it on. So to do
that, we'll go to our Photoshop Preferences. I'll go to Photoshop > Preferences, and then Technology
Previews. If you're on a PC, you'll want to go to Edit, and then Preferences > Technology Previews.
So we'll come down here to Technology Previews, and then enable Content Aware Tracing tool. And
you'll see here a little message that says you'll need to restart, basically. So we'll say OK,
and then go ahead and restart Photoshop. Okay, so I've restarted, and now I'm just going to go
ahead and open a photo. Now this photo I got from Pexels.com. My link will be in the description,
if you want to go ahead and download that and follow along. Now in your tools,
you'll see your Pen tool here. If you click and drag, you'll see the new Content Aware Tracing
tool - this will be added to the list. If you didn't restart, you probably are not seeing this.
All right, so I've selected that, and now I'm going to do a shape up here, I'll do a fill of
none, but I want a purple stroke. We'll make it a little bit darker, and I want it to be
10 pixels. So this is fine. So now I'm going to zoom in a little bit. I'll get back on my Content
Aware Tracing tool. And then when we get on an edge, you'll see that it kind of highlights it.
So if I click on that edge, you can see that it just completely traces around the image.
So if you're used to using your Pen tool to draw in edges to cut out the background of something,
this will save you a lot of time... especially if you're using a photo that has lots of high
contrast like this one. You'll notice that it kind of stopped here and stopped here, so what we want
to do is, we want to add to this path. You can see when you hover over that, it's trying to kind of
figure out where the edges are of things. If we actually click right now, it's going to add
another shape over here, and we don't want that. We want to to add to the shape we already have.
So I'm going to choose this middle one up here at the top, and now when I click this area,
it just adds it to our current shape. Then I can click, maybe I'll click up here.
And of course, you can always zoom in to get a better look at what you're doing. It looks like we
might have a problem right here. I'll get back on my Pen tool and just kind of complete this shape.
Okay, so this is looking pretty good. Now you are going to have times when things like this happen,
and you might have to use your Direct Selection tool to come in here and fix those points. It
looks like we've just got a really big handle on that one.
I'm gonna zoom back out. The Content Aware Tracing tool has done a pretty good job of
figuring out where the edges are. And then you can always come back in and kind of clean up the image
with your Direct Selection tool, kind of just tweak a few things here and there. This mitre
point is just caused by the stroke. It doesn't actually exist all the way out there. All right,
now I'm going to open another image that has some negative space in it. This one is also
from pexels.com. And let's do the same thing here. I'm going to grab my Content Aware Tracing tool,
and I'll just click right on the edge. And now you can see that sometimes it wants to come
in here a little too far. So to get rid of that, we want to turn on Auto Trim.
And that's right up here at the top in the Control panel. So now when I click,
it does a pretty nice job of following that edge. And now it doesn't really know where to go.
It kind of can see that we want to go here, but as you can see, it's kind of doubling back on itself.
To adjust that, we can come up here and go to Detail. And then we can increase this to increase
the number of paths that it can recognize. And so you can see these paths populate in. I can
tell that right in this area, there's not enough contrast and it's not going to know what to do.
So I'm just going to skip that part. But I'll click here and let it kind of finish that area.
Now I don't want to continue this path now. Maybe we'll continue it up into here. Yeah,
that's what we'll do. We'll just grab the red. So I'm going to click here, and then click here
and just finish out that shape. And when it doesn't know what to do a lot of times it'll
put a straight line in there, and you'll have to go in to manually add some detail.
Right here, you can see it kind of is doubling back, it's not following the red.
But if we click over here, it will fix itself. And that is because we have Auto Trim turned on.
A lot of times, if I go too far, it wants to just make a straight line, but if I get closer back
to the last point, it does a much better job. So this tool is sort of in its infancy right now...so
there are parts of it that I can't get to work, actually, like the minus button over here. I'm
assuming that this button at some point will kind of be able to knock out these negative shapes,
but when I was testing this, I could not get that to work the way I wanted it to.
In fact, I couldn't get the minus button to work at all. So in the Comments section, if you have
found a way to use this minus button, please let me know because I have not figured it out yet.
But anyway, we can just kind of keep working on in here. This could actually save you quite a bit
of time with tracing your high contrast stuff. So at some point, we actually ended up creating two
different shapes. Now the cool thing is, we can actually export these Illustrator if we want to,
we can CMD click on them to just select each one of them or combine them,
and then use these to mask out part of the background if we wanted to. So this tool,
which is brand new in 2021, can save you a lot of time if your image has really high contrast.
But I think the parts where the contrast isn't high enough, it still needs a little bit of work.
All right, if you like the way I teach, I also have full courses out on Skillshare,
and there's a link in my description and if you use it, you get two free weeks. That way you can
check out all my courses for free. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!