Adobe illustrator cs4- P4: Good designers have many tools at their disposal. Especially in an environment where most designers have other powerful graphics applications, it can be diffi cult to choose which one to use for a particular task. For example, a designer can apply soft drop shadows in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign—is one application any better than the others for this? | 64 CHAPTER 2 SELECTING AND EDITING ARTWORK many steps as are necessary to display a smooth and gradual transition between key objects Figure . The Specified Steps setting allows you to define exactly how many blend steps Illustrator creates. Using a higher number of steps results in a smoother transition whereas a lower number allows you to see the individual steps in the blend. The Specified Distance setting allows you to specify how far apart each step appears from the next. When you want to create shading techniques using blends the Smooth Color option provides the best results. When creating steps for a Flash animation specifying fewer steps will help playback performance. Figure The Blend Options dialog box offers spacing and orientation options for blending. Orientation. The Orientation setting controls the baseline angle of each step in your blend. With the Align to Page setting each blend step aligns parallel to the bottom of the page even if the path is curved or diagonal. With this setting all blends steps share the same orientation. In contrast the Align to Path setting aligns the baseline of each blend step to the angle of the path. With this setting you ll see that each blend step has a different orientation Figure . Figure On the left the blend is set to the Align to Page option. The blend on the right is set to the Align to Path orientation option. Replacing the Spine of a Blend As we briefly mentioned earlier you ll notice a straight path that connects the key objects in a blend. This path is referred to as the spine of the blend. The individual steps that are created in a blend follow along the spine as CREATING TRANSITIONS WITH BLENDS 65 they connect the two outer objects. The spine is an editable path and you can use the Pen tool and the Direct Selection tool to edit the path if you want to alter the direction of the blend steps. In fact the position of the control handles on a spine can control how the individual steps are .
