Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to reduce anchor
points and simplify shapes in Adobe Illustrator. And this might be something that's good to do if
you've downloaded something from the internet (a vector), and it just has a ton of anchor points.
And sometimes also fonts come with too many anchor points - more than you really need. And these will
bog down your system and make your file size higher. So it's good to simplify in that case.
All right, let's get started. All right, this is an Image Trace that someone made of hand lettering
that I found on the internet, and you can see that it's got a lot of anchor points if we hit A on our
keyboard. Lots of them right over here, quite a few, just quite a few unnecessary points. I do
want to mention that you can control how smooth things are in the Image Trace dialog box also,
so I wanted to put that out there. But this is really just a tutorial on the Simplify option. So
we're not going to really touch on the Image Trace options today. Okay, so let's go to Object > Path
and Simplify. That'll bring up this little bar, and we can adjust how smooth things are going
to get here. Obviously, then is way too far. Or we can bring it a little more this way. If we
go all the way to the right, we basically end up with what we started with. So anything going to
the left a little bit is going to help reduce the number of points and you can see how many points
you're ending up with here. I usually try to go as far to the left as I can without it starting to
look weird. Now there's a little button here also that auto adjusts it, and I rarely use this - I
don't find that it works very well for me. But that is there for you if you want to give it
a shot. Now if we click these three little dots, we'll get into some more advanced options. We can
adjust our curves here. And this is basically what we saw with the little bar a minute ago. I can
see that the bottom of the P is starting to smooth out a little bit. But some of the other things
are not looking too good. And so we also have the corner point angle threshold here. So I'm going to
try for a little bit smoother here. I'm going to come a little bit over here, that looks good.
And of course, we also have our Auto Simplify here, which does the same thing as that other
little button. And this is looking pretty nice to me right now. It's fairly smooth, and I can go in
there and fine tune it in a moment. Now there's some other options down here, and I usually don't
work with these very much, but this will convert everything to straight lines. Sometimes you'll
have some weird results when you click this, like that. This will show the original path. I usually
leave that turned off. And then if you click this one, this big dialog box will always come up,
and these same settings will always be applied. So that's what that does. Okay, so we'll say OK.
And we have a lot fewer anchor points now, which is great. But we still need to do some cleanup. So
I'm going to just zoom in here again on my Smooth tool by hitting N on my keyboard and then holding
OPTION or ALT to toggle to that one. You can also hit Shift S to go straight to the Smooth tool,
but I like to toggle it with the Pencil tool. I'll just move this one in a bit. I'll just
make this a rounded corner here. And I think I'll make both of these round corners, so we can just
grab that white dot. Maybe I like them pointed in this case. I'll zoom in over
here. I'm gonna get on my A tool, which is the Direct Selection tool. It's right up here. Yeah,
I'm just gonna pull this in a little bit. I'll get my Smooth tool and smooth it out
by just dragging over that area. And there are quite a few other little tweaks that I would do,
but this is just a tutorial so I wanted to show you how you can quickly clean up a graphic and
redo some anchor points with the simplify feature. Alright, if you liked this video, please click on
the Like button. And I'll see you next week in another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!