Subtract an image

[Theu]

Hi designers! I have a question about subtracting a shape.

I want to cut out the 'ear' icon you see here a shape out of the triangle.

I've searched and I'm told to do this with subtracts. However, you can see in the toolbar that button is greyed out when I select both layers. 

How can I best solve this?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

 

Edited August 18, 2023 by Theu
Added image

[Hangman]

Hi @Theu and welcome to the forums,

You won't be able to use the subtract boolean in this instance because your 'ear' graphic is a pixel layer. To subtract it from the triangle which is a vector layer, your 'ear' would also need to be a vector graphic.

It would take a couple of minutes to recreate using the pen tool as a vector graphic which you could then use to subtract it from your triangle.

[v_kyr]

27 minutes ago, Theu said:

How can I best solve this?

As Hangman already said by using a vector representation of that ear instead, either by redrawing/tracing that ear manually as vectors, or by autotracing it to vectors with some third-party bitmap/pixel-to-vectors tracing application.

[Theu]

Thank you both very much for your quick reply! Very clear and friendly!

As you may notice, designing is anything but my core discipline.. I tried to convert my icon to an SVG file using Adobe's JPG>SVG converter. However, it still doesn't work, do you have any idea how..? 

@v_kyr I did this before seeing your list of websites. Do you think this is a misconversion issue, or is the problem elsewhere? I'm going to try your suggested alternatives, but I just want to make sure that's the problem.. I only need to convert the icon and not the triangle, right?

logo-ear.svg

[v_kyr]

18 minutes ago, Theu said:

Thank you both very much for your quick reply! Very clear and friendly!

As you may notice, designing is anything but my core discipline.. I tried to convert my icon to an SVG file using Adobe's JPG>SVG converter. However, it still doesn't work, do you have any idea how..? 

@v_kyr I did this before seeing your list of websites. Do you think this is a misconversion issue, or is the problem elsewhere? I'm going to try your suggested alternatives, but I just want to make sure that's the problem.. I only need to convert the icon and not the triangle, right?

logo-ear.svg 6.2 kB · 0 downloads

Not sure what you mean, as your SVG result looks good ...

1. you just have to open that in ADe
2. then select the two curve layers
3. and perfrom a geometrical add, so it results into just one curves layer
4. you can color it gray as your pixel ear before
5. now you can copy that curves layer over into your other ADe document drawing, size it accordingly on that black triangle,
   select the ear and triangle layers and perform a geometrical subtract

 

• logo-ear.afdesign

[Theu]

7 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Not sure what you mean, as your SVG result looks good ...

1. you just have to open that in ADe
2. then select the two curve layers
3. and perfrom a geometrical add, so it results into just one curves layer
4. you can color it gray as your pixel ear before
5. now you can copy that curves layer over into your other ADe document drawing, size it accordingly on that black triangle,
   select the ear and triangle layers and perform a geometrical subtract

 

 

• logo-ear.afdesign

Great! Got it!

The first time I dragged it into AD it showed up as an 'attached document' and it won't work. I didn't know that I really had to do file > open with AD.

Thank you very much for your help! Solved!

[v_kyr]

2 minutes ago, Theu said:

The first time I dragged it into AD it showed up as an 'attached document' and it won't work.

You can always open directly SVG/PDF etc. files via "File->Open" as/in their own docs. And from there you can select the wanted layers and copy/paste them over into other already opened ADe docs. -- Cutting out the ear from the triangle should then be easy too ...

 

 

[Theu]

 

3 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

You can always open directly SVG/PDF etc. files via "File->Open" as/in their own docs. And from there you can select the wanted layers and copy/paste them over into other already opened ADe docs. -- Cutting out the ear from the triangle should then be easy too ...

 

 

Super helpful! Thanks for the video!

Edited August 18, 2023 by Theu