Remove Background And Expand Image： NEW in Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator Update version 30.4 has added two new functions for editing pixels. They are AI-based. Let's take a look at the pros and cons in this video. They are not easy to spot because they are not located with the other ones. The generative AI features are in object, generative there are the features, but those two features are not in there. What do we have? I'm going to select that raster image and as you can see we've got a CMYK file but this is an RGB image which has been linked in this file. And now in the control panel you see this is new, we can remove the background. You can also find that in the object menu there is remove background and it's also in the properties panel. So what does it do? Just hit it and then it gets to work and it does not consume credits while doing so and it has removed the background. As you can see this is not ideal so this image is slightly complex and Illustrator cannot do that. We're going to do this in Photoshop for comparison. So let's switch to Photoshop. Here is an image and we have the object selection tool. You can set it to lasso and then do some selection here. And have the AI do the rest. And there you can see it. So let's switch this background layer to an image layer. And I'm going to invert that selection and just delete it. And you see, Photoshop did a much better job with this. The next thing that has happened here is this image is no longer linked. It's now embedded. This had to happen so that Illustrator could do its editing. But since this is a CMYK file, the image now has also been converted to CMYK. So that's a downside. The next downside is that editing this image in Photoshop, should you need that, is no longer easy. Now the next thing that has been added is extending an image. So we can extend the background of the image or the image itself and That is really not easy to spot because you can't find it anywhere in the menu. So let's select the image and it has been added in the crop image function. So let's hit that one. And this again embeds the image. So same problem as with the other one. Let's hit OK here, and since I haven't turned off the content-aware defaults in the preferences, I'm getting a suggestion for cropping this image. If you don't want that, of course, you need to extend that, and you see, when you go beyond the actual image, now what you would do is actually generate and add something to it. And as you have also seen, it doesn't snap. So if you want to actually crop Then I would suggest you turn on the smart guides, and when you have turned them on, And then drag this. Then you see it snaps. So this is helpful if you want to avoid extending the image. But if you actually want to extend, then of course you drag it beyond. And of course you can do that at all four sides at once or whatever you need. And you see, then we've got this little contextual toolbar and can generate here. So what you cannot do is... Put a prompt there so we can only just generate and here it depends on your subscription whether this costs credit or not. And here we've got it and you see we've got some alternatives so you can go through that and select whatever suits you best and they are also added into the generation history. So we've got these in here and of course this enlarges the file. You want to delete what you do not need. Now, as the warning told us when we started the function, the image got embedded, which converted to CMYK. But now we have an RGB image. That's because this is a generative image. So it's embedded, but it's in RGB. But first it got converted to CMYK. So we have a lot of conversion happening here. It got converted to CMYK and then back. So we do not have the original colors in this Let me demonstrate that with this photo here. I'm first going to show you the original by just hitting Edit in Photoshop. You see, this is the original, very bright and very colorful. Now let's extend that, just like this, and generate. So now we've got the result, and we've got the alternatives, and it's RGB. And let's un-embed it. And take it. And open it in Photoshop as well. It's this one here. Comparison with the original and you see that's like night and day. So we've got a brightness here but now although it's RGB it's no longer bright because it has first been converted to CMYK and then it has been converted to RGB. So that's what's happening when you're doing this. But as you have also seen, if you want to edit that in Photoshop and keep What's left of the quality then you can go to unembed and actually get an RGB image out of this embedded illustrator file. But like with the remove background there's also a reason to do this in Photoshop, because in Photoshop you can do this and put a prompt into it. Let's switch there and open that image and in order to extend that image go to the crop tool. And extend the side that you want to add, and then hit the generative extend, and then hit the generative expand, and put the prompt in there, and then hit generate, and Photoshop will use that prompt for expanding that image. There it has used it and we've got some alternatives and maybe that one. And that is now what you can save. I need to select a different file format. So let's call that number three and let's save that. So now that it has been saved, I'm going to replace it. But that is now something that will get difficult in Illustrator. So let's replace that image. And you see, once you do that, the size changes. So that is something that should be improved so that you can stay with workflows that allow you a lot of flexibility. Thank you for watching until the end. Probably you're interested in other deep dives into Turntable or the mockup feature.