Is This the Best Way to Vectorize Sketches in Illustrator?

Here are all the brand new updates to Illustrator May version. So we've got the new Raster Sketch to Vector, sort of removes that process of us using the Pen Tool and building the shape. I still think that's the better process because this takes at least like 30 seconds to generate. Also, it doesn't get it right. It's not 100% accurate. I've got this quick sketch. What you can do is just click Remove Background and then we're gonna use Concept to Vector. I just did a quick pen sketch. You could use a pencil or other colors. And so we've got this now. I'm just gonna duplicate this. Once you go into Concept to Vector, you can just select which one you want, whether it's geometric lines, liner, etc. I'm going to click geometric, and then you have control over how much you want it to be matched to the reference. So you can have it exact or a bit less. So I'm going to keep it on just more, and you can also turn raster output on if you don't, if you don't want it to be a vector. Then choose your model. I'm just going to use Nanabanana Pro. Shows you the credits, and then I'll click generate, and then you'll see how it turns this quick sketch that I did into a vector. Did a pretty good job. You can see my sketch is pretty rough, but I can scale it down, scale it up, and you can see it's pretty, pretty close. Obviously the beak looks a bit longer. Pretty decent. And see, you can— this corner was sharp, but it sort of made this like bent a bit more. So not as clean as you would think. But yeah, the cool thing is we can start to edit it and it tells you it's a generative object in the top left corner. And then we can double-click in here and like change the colors. And you can see it has a little symbol, so it tells you, um, it was generated. Let's see how clean the vectors are. You can see there's a lot of— the top one's okay, but the bottom here has got a lot of vector points, which we don't want. So I would go in here and clean that up. But if I were to use a pen tool, like, I would have just done like this, so it would have been cleaner from the start. So you can see minimal anchor points. So this— so that's one thing that to keep in mind, it's not 100%. And then if you wanted to change this, we could actually like change it to, let's say we want line art. I can click, uh, generate and it's gonna change the design. And there we have it. You can see now it's changed it to a line art, which looks a bit more goofy. You can see it's all bent and messed up. And you can see in the property panel, it will show you that we've got the two options here. So we can just select back and forth. So that's kind of nice to be able to do that. And then you can use Turntable, which I've shown in another video. We can always go click the cog or go back to the prompts and change it up. So I use my kids crayon and I did this one, um, and you can see it added some of those like artifacts, highlights and shadows. I didn't, even though I didn't really want that. For this one, I selected 3 color and it selected like 1, 2, and the red, uh, the dark red and the light. So, and then I did this one as well. Um, I removed the background. And I did line art. And let's see if we like reflect— let's, um, try and reflect it and see what it's going to do. So we can see that we're doing like the mirror effect, so it looks like a butterfly type of thing. This use case is, it's kind of good if you do want to do a mirroring if it's just simple shapes. Um, but yeah, I think overall it's a pretty interesting. The next new feature is the rewrite feature. So we have a Lorem Ipsum text box here, and what you can do is click on it, and in the contextual taskbar you'll see rewrite. So I can click on that. And then I can put a prompt here and say, make it friendly and write about space or whatever it is. And then I'm gonna click enter or click generate and it will start to generate some text. So now you can see space, the final frontier, captivates our imagination and fuels our curiosity. From the twinkling stars to the vast galaxies, the cosmos invites us to explore its mysteries. Humans have always looked up, wondering about infinite possibilities beyond our planet. So you can see you've got friendly tone, pretty standard, and we can rewrite that. And you can also open the properties panel and go to the bottom, and you can see you've got the options here as well for quick actions. You can also, uh, translate. So if you want to do a different language, maybe let's do French. Now it's in French, which is cool. Um, we can also translate it, 3 different translations options. As you can see, it's got a little bar down the bottom. Let's click done, for example, and there we go, it's back in English. You can also do proofread. It'll check for spelling, grammar, punctuation. So, you know, sometimes we're working on designs and you make a mistake, this will proofread it for you. And if anything's bad, it will do that. And then you can also do fit text, makes doing typography a little bit easier if you're doing more like longer documents. They've also updated the application bar. So in the top right corner, now they've added the— a few other things. So you can actually click on this and it'll actually change the workspace layout or format, as you can see. So you can have multiple windows if you're working on a few designs. So you got, as you can see, a few files open. That's pretty handy if you just want to quickly like switch it up. You've also got your workspace presets. So I've got my Mura one, I've got Adobe Livestream one. Um, you know, if you want to change to Essentials, it will change the workspace to fit your needs. I'm going to go back to my own custom workspace. And then the last thing is you've got your profile, which shows you your current amount of credits that you have with your account. So you can see me, I've got 3,190 credits left, and then I've got— then the features are limited, and then I can manage my account. The next feature is you're now able to edit generative graphics. So anything that you've done text to vector graphic only or turntable, you can do this. So you can see I've got this raven on a branch with a coin that I just generated. And then now you can see the prompt to edit tool in the contextual taskbar. So I can click prompt to edit, see that it's given me some presets like make coin gold, thicken tree branch, or color bird feathers. Let's go make coin gold and it'll put the prompt in. I can also write whatever. I can also say like make leaves gold as well. Make leaves green. And then you can select your model and let's just generate. And this is all available in the current Illustrator app. You don't need to use Illustrator beta. So you can see, zoom in, the raven's black, the coin— it's actually changed the design, which is— I don't know why it did that. It's kind of annoying. Uh, it made the leaves green. It also made the branch brown. I don't think I told it to do that. But anyway, we can prompt to edit again and we can say, let's go color bird feathers. And it's going to add violet, blue, and green colors to the bird feathers for a more striking appearance. Click Generate. Let me see what it did. Oh, that's actually kind of nice. Yeah, it looks really good here, as you can see on these simple shapes. But I did start to add a few shapes in there, like we can see here. If we zoom in, it's got some weird shapes here and artifacting. Like, this should be like black. As you can see. So it's kind of good for something quick, quick concepts. And it's pretty quick to do it. But yeah, I think play around with it. It's nice and easy to just quickly prompt things. Duplicate, prompt to edit. And then we can always say, do only two tones, gold and go pink. And, uh, purple artwork. Let's see if this works. I'm going to use Nanabanana Pro for this one. Generate. And there we have it. Looks good. Nice. So recognize the light parts and the dark parts and put the lights inside the, the shape so it's all outlined. But once again, like, it does mess with the design. Maybe if you say keep all details the same, don't change the design, then you probably have to say that. And then once again, you can just go on the properties panel and then you can always go back, uh, to your last creation. So you can just select it and it will load that in, which is cool. And I'm pretty sure if you left-click and drag it out, you can do that as well. But you can also just click and tap and it will just make, um, bring that in. And then we just ungroup it And then it will go into a normal compound path, as we can see. And we can start playing around with the vectors, and it'll get out of that generative mode. There's also been a few changes to the Align tool. So the Align window got a cleaner look. It's got Distribute Objects, Align Objects, and Distribute Spacing as well. So if we select things— when we select things now, it understands the context that we select it, and you can see it's aligning to the center of the object. If we click on an object, you can see it sets it to align to the artboard. If we select this and then we align, you can see it's going to align to the artboard. If we select two of these together and it's on the artboard, you can see they're going to align both to the artboard. If you want to change it, then we can align the second one. It will align to the object, so it'll bring both objects, as you can see. You've got key object. If we select both key object, you can see this one has a thicker blue line. If you left-click, it will select and make that object the key object. So let's make this the key object. You can see it's got a thick blue line. And then I'm going to click align center. And so now you can see, um, that it's aligned center, whereas before it would— you would have to like, um, use the align tools up here. So you can see this bar at the top, Align Selection, Key Object, and Apple. But now it has it inside this tool because most people probably don't use the tools up in the, um, you know, action bar. So we got that. And then you got Distribute Spacing. When I select this and you can say Distribute Spacing, so we'll auto distribute that, make it even. Then you can also— let's flip it horizontal, right? And if we do horizontal, right, select this, and then if you do horizontal, it's going to do it horizontally and distribute that really easily. Hope you guys enjoyed this quick tutorial on the new features. If you do want to see some more Adobe Illustrator techniques and tools, check out this video here.