In order to scan the image in the best possible quality I had to increase the resolution to 600. Although the higher the resolution the better, but for this case we only had to increase it to 600. The color mode that we had to scan it in was Grayscale because the image only has a few colors. Lastly, we had to adjust the scale to 100%. Once I scanned the image I simply cropped it down so that only the batman logo was in frame and saved it as a Tiff file.
2. Clean Up in Photoshop
I started off by rotating the image so that it was horizontal to the screen. Then I adjusted the levels to make the blacks darker and the whites whiter. This made the logo appear more defined and reduced some of the visible artifacts around the image. Next I changed the image size to 8400 while keeping the ratio of the image. Finally, I saved the image as both a PSD so that I can come back to it later and to transfer over to Illustrator, and as a JPEG for delivery to the blog.
3. Live Trace in Illustrator
Live trace, or image trace, is a visible solution. I wouldn't say that it works wonders but it definitely does the job. I used the Black and White Logo trace for this image since there were only two colors that I needed to be defined. I only needed to know the blacks from the whites in order for me to be able to properly select the areas that I needed.
4. Logo Reconstruction Using the PEN Tool in Illustrator
The PEN tool was very difficult to get the hang of. At first I couldn't get the pen tool to go in the direction that I wanted. Once I realized that the best way to get the pen tool to stay in a perfect oval shape is to hold down the shift key. I started off by placing a point at the top of the oval and holding down the shift key to get a perfect straight line. Then I made a second point at the bottom of the oval while holding down the shift key to get the curved line to be as close to the oval shape as possible. Finally, I connected the bottom point to the top point and readjusted the points with the direct select tool while holding down the option key. This process is used for the bat shape as well, but the bat shape takes more time because of all the curves around the wings. For the bat shape I had to add about 2-3 additional anchor points to make sure that the lines were curved enough to match the shape of the bat. It is very important to change the color of the stroke to a different color then the actual logo. I chose yellow because it contrasted from the black and allowed me to see what I was doing. Once I was done reshaping the lines I changed the stroke of the oval to black and the fill to yellow and the bat to black.
5. File Formats
When I scanned the image I used a tiff file because it is the best possible file so that the image isn't as compressed as if it was saved as a JPEG. Once I opened the image in photoshop I saved it as a PSD so that I wouldn't lose any of my work or quality. I also saved it as a JPEG so that I could deliver my cleaned up version to the blog. When I finished cleaning up the image, I moved over to Illustrator and saved the image as an Ai file once I was done working to save my work and exported as a JPEG to upload to the blog.
6. Advice on Vector Creation
When working on Vector images it is important to have a lot of patience. It may take a while to get the hang of working with all the points, especially if you are trying to outline a logo. I found this assignment to be quite difficult but once I got the hang of it I was able to finish the assignment properly.
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