More Illustrator help (calling Eldanko!)

[Bret608]

Hi all,

More in my ongoing series of queries. These are pretty specific questions, but hopefully they'll be useful in general to other folks.

First, I saw on Eldanko's Triforce Chorus that he was able to use red successfully on a waterslide over a translucent gold enclosure. Could someone look at the attached and see if this red looks like the right "mix" to show up alright if I cop this awesome look?

Next, how does one extract an image from within a larger photograph (jpeg)? What I want to do is get a picture of the "naga" serpent statues that flank the stairs at most Thai/Lao/Cambodian temples, rip just the head out of the overall image, and then render it as a line drawing-type thing in the same color as the font and border.

Thanks if anyone can point me in the right direction here!

Cheers,

Bret

[eldanko]

Bret -

I took a look at your PDF - lovely design sir!  What sort of text is this?  Some thoughts:

1) The red on your box should be fine for print - looks like you're using the same swatch I did!  Brighter colors like this darken nicely once the waterslide is applied. 

2) Your upper row of text is a slightly different color than your lower row.  May not matter, but I noticed it when I imported into Illustrator 

3) You might consider making the stroke on your rectangle a little beefier, but it's more personal preference.  I find that a 2.5 px stroke is just right nowadays.  Now that I'm looking at it, slightly bolder text might not hurt either... If there's no boldface option for that type, you can do a "faux" bold by adding a small stroke of the same color to your text, as long as it doesn't cloud things up too much. 

Per the image extraction... I'm assuming you're wanting to carve a certain shape out of a larger photograph?  Sounds like a Photoshop job.  You can try to magic wand the background away, but it sort of depends on the picture whether or not that will work.  Best option is to just manually erase all of the pixels you don't want... start with a large eraser, then work your way smaller... it'll take a little time, but I generally get the best results that way.

Feel free to shoot the image you'd like to eldanko21@gmail.com and I can take a look at it for you.

[Bret608]

Thanks Dane! The script is Thai. Believe it or not, Windows already has Thai keyboarding capabilities built in, so since I know the language, I thought it'd be fun to use it on a pedal. I can do Lao as well, but the Thai sort of popped out at me more in this case.

I appreciate the tips and will definitely make use of them. Once I find a good image, I will definitely send it to you. You're right; I'm hoping to carve an image out of a larger photo.