and reduce the noise
so that we actually introduce more noise
and that's going to make it more spectrally
which in this case is exactly what we want.
but rather just an image
that will yield a better tracing result.
Now, we have the issue
that the image is dark at the top right
and much lighter at the bottom left.
So I'm going to try and address that
with a curve
and use my targeted adjustment.
Drag down at the bottom left
so that we are reducing light at that point.
That's making everything darker.
So I'm going to compensate by coming to my layer mask
and then choosing my gradient tool.
Making sure that I am in a full ground
to transparent gradient.
And that black is my full ground color.
I'll drag down from the top.
So that's going to even things out now.
Hopefully that will be as much as we need to do.
When I save this,
it's going to require that I save it as a Photoshop file
because JPEGs don't support transparency.
And that means that when I return to Illustrator,
nothing is going to happen
because Illustrator is still looking for the JPEG version
which is unchanged.
So I will now need to relink
the JPEG version with the PST version.
And then it will update in place
using the same tracing settings.
Now, that's a much more promising result
but we have much too much black.
So I'm going to come to my threshold slider
and bring this to the left.
Okay, at this point I now want to put this in position.
I'm not going to expand it yet
converting the image to vectors
because I may yet need to make some more changes
to the image tracing options.
But I'm going to cut it from here.
Command Ctrl+X and return to my first art board.
Let's just take a look at the layers panel.
Everything that we need
is on the start layer.
I'm going to select the start layer
by clicking on its bulls eye.
And then come to my transparency panel
where I will add an opacity mask for this layer.
Click on Make Mask
and then uncheck the clip checkbox.
Then making sure that you are clicked
onto the opacity mask thumb nail,
we can see there's a blue line around that.
Paste your tracing image command Ctrl+V
And now let's position this.
Okay, well, if I did want to modify this further,
I can come to my image trace settings.
And I might just slightly increase the noise slider.
Which somewhat counts retentively,
reduces the amount of noise
and I'm also going to move
the threshold a little bit to the left.
So I could carry on refining that
but I'm going to go with what I have now.
I'll expand the result.
So I now have vectors.
Vectors created from the pixels.
I might wish to just adjust
the scaling of the whole traced element.
But before I do that,
so that I can really get a better idea
of what I'm working with,
I'll come to the View menu
and choose hide edges.
Now I'm going to hold down my option Okay
and just reduce the width of that from its center point.
And then I can try and position it
exactly where I want it to go.
Now if we take a look at the opacity mask,
everything that is black
and where we have black shapes on the opacity mask
that is going to completely knock out the color
or mask the color on the layer itself.
If that is too strong a result
which I think it is in this case,
then we can come to the opacity mask
and we can select all these elements.
Everything is selected but I've hidden the edges.
Come to the swatches and apply a
in this case, I got to go with a 40% gray.
Let's now see how
that works, within the context of the whole composition.
Now I think that's a whole lot better.
So doing it this way,
the texture has been vectorized
and we can scale our logo to our heart's content
without worrying about any sort of resolution issues.
So that's placing an image,
image tracing it, going back and forth between Illustrator
and Photoshop to make sure
that you have prepared your image
so that it yields the best tracing result.
And then using that as an opacity mask.