Raster Effects Settings

When you begin to apply effects to an illustration, it is important that the resolution of your document is set correctly.
Why?

Well, some of the effects that you can apply are pixel-based effects and therefore resolution-dependent.

So you see when you click on “Effect” button in the menu bar, that these effects are divided into two categories.

You have the Illustrator effects (1) and you have the Photoshop effects (2).

All Photoshop effects are pixel-based effects and a few Illustrator effects are just that.

This means, when a document begins with a resolution of 72 ppi, you make a number of illustrations where you apply an effect on and then you come to the conclusion that you want to send your document to a printer. The only solution is that, you should raise your document ppi to 300 ppi, the effect is not the same document, it will look different than when it was 72 ppi.

So the best thing you can do before you start working with effects is, knowing what you want to do with your document and enter the correct settings.

You can do this quickly by clicking and changing the options in “Document Raster Effects Settings …” (3).

This opens a dialog where you can change the resolution of your document.

For those who do not believe me, I’ll give an example.
I have a T-shirt below where a “Gaussian Blur” effect is applied.
On the left my document has a ppi of 75 (1) and on the right side, the document has a ppi of 300 (2).

So you see that there is indeed a difference.

It is nothing to worry about, just so you know when the ppi of your document changes, the appearance of your objects can be very different. Especially when you have used pixel-based effects.

Photoshop effects are all pixel-based, I already told you that.
Regarding the Illustrator effects, the “Inner Glow” and “Outer Glow”, “Feather” and “Drop Shadow” found under the “Stylize” category, are pixel-based effects.

All the rest are vector-based effects, so nothing to worry about you when you need to change the ppi of your document.

 

3D “Extrude and Bevel”

I certainly will not discuss all the available effects in Illustrator here, but I just want to go through some of them.

The first is the 3D effect.

For the 3D effect we have two possibilities, you have “Extrude and Bevel” and “Revolve”.

Let me first start with the first, “Extrude and Bevel”.
When you click this effect, it opens a dialog box.

Let me discuss the different options in this dialog.

The first box is the “Preview” (1). When this is selected, you see the results immediately in your document. If you have a fast computer you can check this, but if you have a slow computer, it is better that you not select this option. This will reduce the processing of your computer significantly in some cases.

In the “position” (2), we have a list of preset positions for the object.

Among them we find the rotation window (3).

In the rotation-window, we have a number of opportunities to rotate the object.

One, you place your cursor over a surface (A) and drag it in the direction that you want to turn.

Two, you put your cursor over an edge (B) and you drag the cursor depending on the border you have chosen, left / right or top / bottom. Using this way, you have no option other than to rotate the object around the axis of this edge.

A third way is to make use of the rotary ring around the window (c). This allows you to turn the object clockwise or anti-clockwise.

And a fourth way is by typing in values in the headings “Rotation around the x-axis,” “Rotation around the y-axis” and “Rotation around the z-axis” (D). Use values between -180 and 180.

For clarity, the x-axis is the horizontal axis, the y-axis is the vertical axis and the z-axis is the depth-axis.

If you wish to change the perspective, type a value between 0 and 160 in the “Perspective”.

In the “Extrude Depth”, we set the depth of the object with a value between 0 and 2000.

With the “Cap”, we determine whether we want the object to appear as a solid form or an open form.

Below we have the “Bevel” (5). It adds or removes a bevel on the original form. The box “Height” controls the height of the edge.

And then we have the “surface”. It allows you to choose options for the shade of surfaces.

We still have the “Map Art” button, we will discuss it in the next lesson and we have “More Options”.
Clicking on the “More Options” provides some additional options which are all related to the exposure of the object.

With the light (1) orb, you determine where the light is located. Drag the light to the desired position on the orb.
Among the orb we have three buttons.
With the first we place the selected light to the foreground or background.
The second button, we add a new light.
And with the third button we remove a light.

With “Shading Color” (3), we determine the color of the shadow. Default is set to “Black”, but if you want a different color for this, choose “custom” from the drop-down menu and choose a color by clicking on the color picker.

And on the right side of the options window, we have a number of options, all of which relate to the intensity of the exposure (4).

Featured Courses

• Downloading iPad Apps
• Lesson 1: Introduction to Publisher
• Lesson 65: File Formats