I can’t believe this worked…

Adobe just added a new concept of vector feature to the main release of Illustrator and it turns rough sketches, concepts, or images into editable vectors in seconds. So, in this video, we're going to put it to the test. I'm going to show you how it works, how to get better results, and we'll see whether it's actually useful for real-world design projects. And if you're looking to master design with Illustrator, I've been at it for over 20 years and I've linked to my full Illustrator courses below. Righty-oh, let's go. Right, so we've got a few different examples you can see here. We're going to try these out. Some of these are things I created. I know they're terrible, please don't laugh. Other things are images I've grabbed from the internet. Let's start with the first one. This is a logo that I tried to grab off a poster for something the other day and it's just so low-res and I couldn't find this logo anywhere. Like it was just literally nowhere and I wanted a version that I didn't want to have to recreate it. So, what we can do is go to object, down to generative, and then we've got concept to vector here. However, we also have a new panel. So, we may as well just open up the concept panel because we're going to be using this a lot. So, I've got this selected. Lots of different versions here or you can type a prompt if you want something specific. So, I'm just going to go for geometric. You can see we have the lovely mushroom preview and it pops a prompt in there, which is nice. You can choose how much you'd like it to match the reference image. So, I'm going to keep it maxed out. Raster output, that just basically means it's not going to be vector. So, we don't want that. We definitely want it vector so I can still edit it. And then the model here. So, different models are going to give varying results. I think these ones here are much better than the original nano banana, but you can see the cost is 10 credits. Yeah, I know. Unfortunately, we have the credit system here as well, but they're 10 credits, these are 40. So, I may as well just use these because they do give the best result. So, I'm going to click generate and we'll give it a minute and see what it does. So, that's not ideal. What I'm going to do is try and change the prompt. Create a clean vector logo. Okay, wow. So, I think in some instances, the default prompt is fine, as you'll see in a moment, but in this case just writing a simple prompt was a heck of a lot better. Now, this is all vector as well. If you want to edit this, just ungroup it with command or control shift and G, and then we have all of this stuff we can edit. So, we could go and get rid of this. You could get rid of the colors. Or, to be honest, what we could do is we could sample these background colors. Yeah, let's do something like this. And then if we use the magic wand tool, we can sample this gold color. And we'll try and change that to black. There we go. Nice. Or, what we could have done is just type black and white logo in the prompt. That probably would have been a bit quicker. And obviously, you can see it's not perfect. There's still a few bits and pieces. Considering how quick that was using the right prompt, that's pretty damn impressive. And if I zoom into a few of these elements here, you can see the border width around here is pretty consistent. The way these lines run parallel, the way the star is pretty much almost in the middle, I think. So, there's obviously a few little details that are off, but actually a lot of the other hearts of the numbers and the shapes, even the text up here, it's pretty damn clean. Right, next up we have this. This is a sketch I did for a logo design project. I don't know what the hell I was thinking or what it's meant to be. I think it's meant to be like a a spatula and a wooden spoon or something. I don't know. It's a bit embarrassing. But anyway, what we're going to do is we're going to choose line art. We're going to leave the prompt empty and see if it can determine what the heck it is, even though I don't know. And the great thing about line art is this option should turn this into editable strokes. So, whereas with image trace, when you trace something in Illustrator, it has a shape with a solid fill, this is going to enable us to keep the strokes editable, which is amazing if you are going to be doing any sort of line work in Illustrator. Yeah, there we go. I mean, to be fair, that is pretty much what I sketched. I'm not entirely sure what it was meant to be. In fact, let's just change it. Create a clean precise line drawing in black and white of a spatula and a let's put tennis racket instead cuz it could be a tennis it is halfway to being a tennis racket. I just want to see what it does. Flipping heck. Wow, I seem to be having a lot more luck when I actually just either type in or add something to my prompts. Let's bring these two in we can compare. I mean this is awful. This has done a really good job based on my terrible design. And if I ungroup this as well, have I got the strokes? No, not on this one. I think on the other one I had the strokes didn't I? Cuz it was very simple line work. On here I don't have the strokes. Yeah, these ones were strokes. So I think cuz I maybe edited the prompt or something it stopped working and didn't do that. This first one they were editable strokes. So we'll try that again in a bit and see what we get. Right, onto number three. I think this was a concept for a logo for something. I can't quite remember. Create a clean linear black and white logo. We'll go line art again. Oh, it adds a prompt in there. I'm going to try it. We'll see what it does. And you can see this sketch is very rough and scrappy around the top so I'll be curious to see how it handles this. Okay, interesting. So let's ungroup that. Is this all still editable strokes? Yes, it is. Cool. Right, let's move these over then. So we'll scale you down and bring this one in. What we could actually do here is because it's symmetrical go ahead and delete half of it. And then what have we got here? We can then smooth out this line. Got a few strange bits going on here. So these are all separate lines as well which is good. So we can just delete the bits we don't really want. There we go. Select these and press command control alt or option J and we can snap them together and join them. So we'll do the same here. We're just going to break these lines. Oh my goodness, what on earth is going on here? So let's make a couple of cuts with the scissors tool. Delete. And we can average them and join them that way. A little bit wonky here. Let's see if we can just quickly fix that with the smooth tool. Or we could just delete everything and then re-pen tool it. Again, I don't know what's going on up here. We'll cut that. We'll cut that. And then what we'll do is we'll grab the pen tool and just fix that piece there. And this bit here is going a bit weird as well. There we go. So, we could relatively quickly fix this. I'm not going to go and do every single piece. So, we very quickly created that half piece. We've not had to worry about trying to get all the curves smooth and everything. And then we can use the reflect tool, hold alter option, click, and reflect a copy vertically. And then now we have perfect symmetry. So, we generated it. It wasn't perfect. We tidied up just the left half and then we've duplicated it over. And that can be a pretty quick way to do something that would otherwise potentially be quite complicated and tricky getting all the curves looking pretty smooth. Right, next up we have a really old, scrappy, and very rough illustration of a karambit knife. You might have seen these in the old movies. Let's try three color. We'll just see what it does. This doesn't have a lot of detail. Oh, nice. That's pretty cool. And the thing I like about this is the line work is just so clean as well. And I can easily then go and ungroup this, you know, get rid of the background. And if I did want to chuck some colors in there or whatever really, I can go and do that. I don't know what's happened here with the geometry. It's gone a bit wild, but hopefully we can just select some of this and unite it together. Yeah, so it's not too bad. It's not perfect, but we could just go in there and, you know, chuck in another hole for the end point. What you get with the geometry can be a bit hit or miss, but I think as well some of this might come down to the prompts that you use as we've kind of seen already. Right, this one. This is a really cool example because we have a lovely, delicious slice of pizza. Now, I could ask it to go and add color to this and I'm sure it would do a great job, but I don't want to do that. I want to just get the line work. So, I'm quite literally just going to choose line art and I want it all as editable strokes so I can then go and fine-tune the stroke weight and then go and add the colors myself with the life paint bucket tool. And that is pretty damn good. So, again, let's ungroup it, get rid of this bounding box thing, select it, and there we go. Yeah, I've got the I can adjust all of the different stroke properties. That's amazing. So, I could select this now, K for the live paint bucket tool, and paint my pizza black if I wanted to. Seriously burned pizza. So, I could just throw in some color there. And you could see with the live paint bucket tool I could make very short work of that indeed. So, that has turned out really well. I am going to go back a step cuz I just want to try the textured one. Create a color detailed layer dense illustration. I want to see what it's going to do with this. And even if I don't end up using the final end result, one thing I found with this concept of vector feature is that it can sometimes generate details, shadows, highlights, and things, which can be very useful in teaching me, someone who's not primarily an illustrator, where some of those details can go or should go so that illustration looks right. And then I can go and generate a plain version and go and add those details in myself. Oh my goodness. Well, that is not what I had in mind. It is very tribal, I'll give it that. But you see what I mean? You could use this as a potential source of inspiration for something. Anyway, moving on. So, this next one we have kind of like a a painting here, and I want to simplify this into a vector graphic. So, what could we do here? Turn this into a clean vector graphic with clean shapes. I guess. I don't know. I'm not going to win prompter of the year, am I? Oh my goodness, that is absolutely brilliant. Let's bring these both onto the artboard. Wow, that's done an amazing job. So, if we go ahead and ungroup that, let's go and have a look at what it's created. So, it's not like left a cutout like you sometimes get with image trace. These are actual shapes that are placed on top as well. So, if I I can keep on grouping stuff, and the geometry here is actually really clean. Apart from a few bits up here, but that's not too hard to fix. The fact that rest of the illustration here has come through pretty much almost identical to how this looks, but in a clean simplified version, that's really good. And that's the sort of thing that is going to save a lot of people a lot of time. Right, next up something very different. This is a sketch drawing that I grabbed off the old Google, and we're just going to choose drawing, use the preset, hit generate, and see what it does. And remember, this is going to be a vector as well. So, if this is a pencil drawing, and let's say it's a bit low res, if this can generate a decent version, it's going to be vector, so we can actually scale it up to any size, and we're not going to lose that quality. My goodness, that is pretty damn good. Also geometry, as you could see. And if we zoom in, you can see there's lots of color in there as well, well not color, but like different shades of gray. So, maybe we could add into the prompt just black and white only. But when you zoom out and look at both side by side, that's pretty cool that it was able to digitize that in vector very quickly and pretty accurately as well. And even down the bottom, you know, it's got the the name and the date, even though [laughter] it's got the date wrong. But I think is that the 15th or the 25th? I don't know, I'm not sure. Either way, we've got the 13th over here. They're close, but not quite. And lastly, we're going to look at this one. This is a drawing sketch thing I did years ago. It's not great, and it's not really what I do. What we're going to do is we're going to click it, we're going to choose wildcard, and we're going to see what it does with the face and the features and everything. I could go and type more into the prompt, but I just want to see what it does with this. Because if it even does a half decent job, I think the main win that I would get from that is being able to look at details like the eyes, the nose, and the mouth. If it does a decent result for this, I can then use this as a basis to have another go at drawing my own version. Oh, wow. That wasn't quite what I was looking for. Create an illustration with expressive colors. Well, let's get rid of that. Create an illustration of this face. Yeah, let's try that. I don't know, maybe I'm better at prompting than I give myself credit for. And to be honest as well, before doing this video, like I practiced with a few of these just to see what results you can get. Sometimes it is really good and spot-on, other times it's just wildly off. So, unfortunately, it is a little bit of a lucky dip. But, I'm sure this feature, like most things, will improve with time. Ah, that is a lot better. So, right, this is exactly what I'm looking for. So, I wouldn't necessarily use this, but what I would do is I'd look at the eyes and go, "Okay, the eyes look better than mine." The nose, we've got that detail there. We've got the nostrils. So, we've got quite minimal detail. The mouth as well, the shape of the mouth, the highlight here. That is pretty useful stuff. So, then at least I could then take that, get the eyes, nose, and the mouth right, and the general face shape and everything, and I could go ahead and create my own version from scratch and use this as more of a reference image as well. And to be honest, given the very, very rough, badly done nature of this sketch, painting, drawing thing, whatever it is, this one is actually pretty close. So, yeah, if we zoom back out, that is the concept to vector feature. And this feature was originally called sketch to vector, but they renamed it because this does have more applications than just sketches. If you want to give it a go, it is now available in the latest version of Illustrator. [music]