Adobe illustrator cs4- P12: 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? | 304 CHAPTER 9 DRAWING WITH EFFICIENCY Figure The Make Opacity Mask feature one of the most powerful commands in Illustrator is hidden masked if you will in the Transparency panel menu. Make Opacity Mask Hide Thumbnails Show Options Release Opacity Mask Disable Opacity Mask Unlink Opacity Mask New Opacity Masks Are Clipping New Opacity Masks Are Inverted Page Isolated Blending Page Knockout Group Figure Once the opacity mask is applied the artwork fades to transparent. Editing an Opacity Mask Once you ve created the opacity mask you can use the thumbnails in the Transparency panel to work with both the mask and the artwork beneath it. Instead of one thumbnail as you saw before there are now two thumbnails The one on the left is the artwork and the one on the right is the mask. To edit the artwork click the left thumbnail. If you look at your Appearance panel you ll notice that the object you have selected is a normal path that has a solid fill attributed to it. The name of the path displays with a dashed LOOKING BEHIND THE MASK 305 underline in both the Appearance panel and the Layers panel indicating that it has an opacity mask applied Figure . At this point the mask is not editable and it can t even be selected. Figure A target with a dashed underline quickly identifies an object that has an opacity mask applied to it. Clicking the right thumbnail selects the mask allowing you to edit its attributes Figure . Take a look at the Layers panel doing so reveals something very interesting. Instead of displaying all the layers and objects in your file when you click the mask thumbnail the Layers panel switches to display just the opacity mask Figure . The title bar of your document also indicates you are editing the opacity mask and not the art. These visual indications help you easily identify when you are editing art and when you are editing an opacity mask. To return to artwork-editing mode simply click the left thumbnail icon again. .
