Adobe Illustrator CS5 Tutorials
Filters & Effects / Soft Edges
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Illustrator CS5 / Filters & Effects / Soft Edges)
Typically when you start out to create some artwork in Illustrator you wouldn't think that you would be able to create soft edges like you could in Photoshop. But you absolutely can. So I'm going to show you two quick techniques you can use to soften the edges of your objects. So we're going to create a soft, fluffy cloud, but first we have to start with the vector artwork. So follow along with me if you wan to and we're going to grab the Oval Tool and we're going to draw a couple overlapping Ovals and we're going to create a Cloud by the time we're done. So I'm going to squint my eyes just a little bit so I can focus on the outside of this shape and try to see where this cloud is going to. Alright that looks kind of good so far. Now we have two choices when we want to combine these guys. The easiest way of course is to grab all of them by using our Selection Tool and we can go to the Window Menu and we can choose our Path Finder Filter or Tools and we can click this first one right here called Unite. And that gives us one shape out of all those combined ones or I'll undo that. We can also grab our Shape Builder Tool and if you haven't seen the lesson on this great new feature in Adobe Illustrator CS5 please check it out, Shape Builder. I'm going to hold down the Shift Key right around here and I'm going to Drag Select and when I let go of my mouse wahla we have the same thing. We have a filled in shape that has nothing but the color we have selected. Now we're going to change the color of this to Blue. I'm also going to select it again, because I accidentally deselected it and I'll get rid of the stroke. So we're going to go where it says none. Now we're going to go to the Effect Menu, we're going to go down where it says Stylize and we're going to choose Feather. Feathering gives you the ability to take the edges of something and gradually soften them as they leave where you indicate. So, this is our hard line and we're going to feather from here all the way out. You can choose the Radius or how far this effect occurs by increasing or decreasing this number. So by default I believe its 15, but I made mine 35 earlier. If I want to get a Preview I'll click it right here and we see that we have this beautiful, soft, edge now and once we deselect it you're not even going to see this outline at all. So I'm going to hit OK, I'll deselect and now you have a beautiful, soft edge. If you really want to get he best results make sure you turn off that stroke. So that is one way to do this. Let me go ahead and Undo that and now I'm going to show you another way. Now it's not as nice as far as the soft edge look, its more painterly. So we can go to Effect, Artistic and we could choose something in this category if we wanted to. So we could choose something like a Dry Brush or we could choose something like an Underpainting or any of these guys to also do the same thing. But once again its not going to look as good. So I'll go ahead and choose Dry Brush and in a moment this Panel opens up and as you can see we have some kind of softening on the edges here. But the beautiful thing about choosing any of these Effects here is we can open up them all and click on these to see what we get here. So we have Colored Pencil and you can see we are changing the edge here, film grain, paint dobs and you can see some slight softening but not really too soft on the edges. As I mentioned before its not as nice as the one we chose, but the rough pastels will also give you a nice rough look. I'll go ahead and hit OK and we can see what we have. Alright so I'll zoom in and we can look at that edge. So it is soft but it's a little bit more pixilated and once again I'll Undo. One more thing we can do is go back to Effect. We can go to Blur and we can choose any of these categories as well. So as you can see there are quite a few options available to you when you want to soften the edges of your Illustrator Artwork. You don't just have to have it hard all the time you can have it nice and soft on the edges and you can kind of get it away from being that traditional Illustrator look. So let me go ahead and just drop this down, hit OK and we're going to apply a Gaussian Blur to this particular piece of artwork and I'll zoom in and we have a nice soft edge. So once again when you didn't think it was possible it absolutely is to have some softness inside of your Illustrator artwork.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Illustrator CS5 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 34146 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-40-2 |
| Release Date: | 2010-07-26 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 107 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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