From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

Adjusting the opacity with shortcuts - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

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Adjusting the opacity with shortcuts

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- Over the course of this movie, I'll show you how you can vary the translucency of an object by adjusting its opacity setting. And I'll also introduce you to a few keystrokes that are available to those of you who loaded D keys, because they're going to make your life way easier. Over the course of this chapter, we're going to take this place photograph from the Dreamstime image library, about what you can learn more and get some great deals @dreamstime.com/deek.php. And we'll turn her into this kind of fashion treatment here. And we'll wrap things up by tattooing her face. Now, zoom, this far out, this effect might look a little choppy, but as soon as we zoom in things smooth out quite nicely. Now you'd be glad to know that I've drawn all the path outlines in advance, so that we can focus all of our attention on blend modes and opacity masks. All right, so I'm going to start things off here by deleting this Dreamstime layer, which I can do just by selecting it and clicking on the little trash icon, in the bottom right corner of the layers panel, and then I'll click the yes button in order to make it. Now I want you to notice what's going on here. We have a lot of layers, but just two of them are currently turned on. So we've got the place photograph. And then in the background, we have a big rectangle filled with a radial gradient. Now notice that I've masked the photograph. We first discussed clipping masks back in chapter 23 of the advanced course, but because clipping masks are a transparency tool, that is to say, they allow you to define what's opaque, and then what's transparent. I figured we quickly review the process. So I'm going to start things off just by clicking inside this woman's face and notice that she's surrounded by a path outline. And then I'll go up to the object menu, choose clipping mask and choose release in, order to expose the original photograph. Then I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+Shift A or command shift A on the Mac to de-select my artwork. Now I just want you to see that this path outline here has no fill and a black one point stroke. All right, I'll go ahead and put that back by pressing Ctrl+Z or command Z on a Mac. And then I'll go ahead and select this place Photograph by clicking on it and I'll press Ctrl+X or command X on the Mac to cut it to the clipboard. Then you want to select the path outline and the easiest way to put the photograph inside of it is in my case to switch to the two column toolbox and then drop down to this draw inside icon and click on it. Next, You want to go to the edit menu and choose paste in place. In order to paste the image into the path outline. And then finally you want to click on the drawn normal icon once again, located at the bottom of the toolbox. And then you can go ahead and switch back to the single column toolbox if you like. All right, now you may recall if you watch the live action introduction that I said that blend modes and opacity masks live together in the opacity panel. The only problem with that is there really, isn't such a panel inside of illustrator. You can click on the word opacity up here in the control panel in order to bring up what's actually known as the transparency panel, inside of illustrator. Otherwise, everything I said is true. We've got a list of blend modes right here, and then we've got no past the mass function, both of which we'll take a look at in future movies. But just so that we have unfettered access to that panel, I'm going to go up to the window menu and I recommend you do this as well and choose the transparency command. If it has a check mark in front of it, that means it's already up on screen. As we can see over here to the right of the window. All right, now notice even when the panel is collapsed, as it is right now, we can see this. So pass the value right there, if you can't see it, for some reason, you can expand the panel by clicking on this double arrow icon a few times. All right so notice if I click on a word opacity, then I'll highlight the value at a 100%, it is a 100% opaque. At 50%, we end up with a kind of 50/50 mix. So we're seeing 50% of the selected image and we're revealing 50% of that purple gradient in the background. If you dial in some other value, then you're going to get a different kind of mix. So if I take this opacity value all the way down to 20%, let's say, we're seeing 20% image and a 100% minus 20% or 80% background. And so higher opacity values are going to give you more opaque images and lower opacity values are going to give you more translucent images. And you can enter something like 33% if you like, but you do have to work in whole number increments all the way down to incidentally 0%, which will make the image entirely invisible. Now you might think why in the world would you do that? After all you want to see the image to some extent. Well, we'll see uses for 0% opacity in future movies. Now here's where things get a little more interesting in my opinion. If you loaded D keys, then you have some very easy shortcuts which are entirely borrowed from Photoshop. So if you tap the five key, you're going to set the opacity value to 50%. So you don't even have to bother going over to this value and changing it. You just have to tap a key. If you tap the 8 key, you're going to set the opacity to 80%. The 9 key will take it to 90%. And if you want to restore an opacity value of a 100%, you just tap the zero key. All right, in the same works down the keyboard. If you tap the two key, you're going to set the opacity value to 20%, if you tap the one key, you'll get 10%. And for those of you who are working with American keyboards, if you tap the Tilda key, which is just to the left of the one key, you'll take the opacity value down to 0%. So there's no need by the way, to press any modifiers, you don't have to press control or command or anything like that. You just have to tap a number. Now, my case, I'm interested in keeping the opacity at a hundred percent for now. So I'll go ahead and tap the zero key in order to make it so. And that friends is how you modify the translucency of a selected object, whether it's a placed image or anything else you can create inside of illustrator using the opacity value. That's often found up here in the control panel. It's always found in the transparency panel here inside illustrator.

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