- [Voiceover] In this movie, we'll discuss
a command located under the effect menu
called Document Raster Effects Settings,
and it controls the resolution of any pixel-based effects
inside of Illustrator.
Now, notice that we have two groups of dynamic effects
here inside this menu.
One is labeled Illustrator effects,
and the other is labeled Photoshop effects.
Now, for the most part the Illustrator effects
are vector-based effects,
meaning that if you were to expand the effect,
you would end up with vector-based path outlines,
and for the most part, the Photoshop effects
are pixel-based effects, most of which
come from Photoshop's filter gallery.
Vary pretty wildly in terms of their utility, by the way.
The main exceptions are these guys
under the Blur sub-menu, including Gaussian Blur,
which you may sometimes find useful,
and then we have some Pixelate effects
that were originally designed by Adobe's engineers
that you might give a try if you want,
but my guess is you won't be applying
these effects very often in Illustrator,
because they work a lot better inside Photoshop.
There are, however, four commands up here
in the Illustrator effects that are actually pixel-based.
That is to say, they are raster effects,
and they include these four options here
in the Stylize sub-menu, including Drop Shadow,
Feather, Inner Glow, and Outer Glow,
and that's because these are all fuzzy effects.
Drop Shadow creates a fuzzy directional shadow.
Feather will go ahead and fuzz up
the edges of a path outline.
Inner glow creates a glow on the inside of a path,
and outer glow creates a glow on the outside.
Now, what I want to do where this particular effect
is concerned, is trace along the outer edge
of each one of the petals, so I'll start
by clicking anywhere inside the artboard,
in order to select this little eight-pointed circle here,
and then inside the appearance panel,
I'll click on the fill to select it.
Then, I'll go up to the effect menu,
choose Stylize, and choose Outer Glow.
These are the settings I came up with.
I'll go ahead and click on the color swatch
to show you that I really dialed in
a hue value of 15 degrees, then a saturation of 100%,
and then a brightness of 50%, but things got
averaged down in order to accommodate the RGB values.
At which point I'll click OK, then I want to
darken things up, so I change the blend mode to Multiply.
My opacity value is set to 100%,
and I took the blur value down to 0.3 points,
so you can go with partial points if you want to,
but notice if I turn on the preview checkbox,
I don't see a darn thing, and that's because
my outer glow effect is now going to be applied
after the transform effect, which is not what I want at all,
but given the way I've approached things,
I need to accept this effect by clicking OK,
and now notice, Transform's on top,
meaning it's applied first, and outer glow
is on the bottom, meaning it's applied second.
What we need to do is reverse the order,
so I'll click and drag outer glow above transform,
and then we end up seeing this effect here.
But, can you make it out?
It's awfully herky-jerky and the reason is that
it starts off as a tiny little outer glow,
and then it gets magnified by the transform effect,
and as a result, we see some
pretty big clumpy junk going on.
It becomes even more obvious if I
turn off these two effects right here,
Transform and Pucker & Bloat.
Notice now, we're seeing these really horrible edges
all over the place, and that's because
this is ultimately a low resolution effect.
To change that, go to the effect menu,
and choose Document Raster Effects Settings.
Now, at this point, it's not at all necessary
that the path outline be selected,
and I'm gonna demonstrate that by
pressing the Escape key here,
and then pressing Control + Shift + A,
or Command + Shift + A on a Mac,
to deselect the artwork, and that's because
Document Raster Effects Settings
controls the entire document.
I'll just go ahead and choose the command,
and because I started with a basic RGB file,
my resolution is set to 72 ppi,
which nine times out of 10, is just fine.
If you were to go back and look at the outer glow effects
that we assigned to the cubes, they look
absolutely great at 72 pixels per inch,
and that's because they're blurry.
You don't need a lot of pixels to represent blur.
Our problem is we're magnifying the problem
significantly here, and as a result,
we need to take it up to something like High, at 300 ppi.
Now, that is the default setting for print,
not really necessary.
I'm just gonna tell you this.
If you find that your blur effects
and your shadows, and your glows, and so forth,
start behaving really super slowly in a print document,
go to this command, and try taking the resolution down.
It'll speed things up tremendously,
you won't believe how much, and I'll be surprised
if you see any bad effects, even in print,
and that's because, again, I really want to make this clear,
you don't need many pixels for most blurry effects.
This one is an exception, and so I'm gonna choose High,
and then I'll click OK, and things get better,
but they're still not great.
Notice that we have some uneven effects going on here.
It looks like we have kind of dark blobs
every once in a while, and so what we need to do
is raise the resolution even higher
by returning to the effect menu,
choosing Document Raster Effects Settings,
and then I'm gonna set resolution to Other,
and I'm gonna take this custom value here
up to 1,200 pixels per inch,
and notice now if I click OK,
I end up with some very smooth effects indeed,
and this helps me to accommodate
that very thin edge, that 0.3 point blur that I applied,
and in the case of this image,
things keep humming along pretty well.
It will take longer to save your file however,
that's just something you'll need to know.
All right now I'll go ahead and turn Pucker & Bloat
and Transform back on, and we end up
with a very good looking effect.
Whether we're zoomed in here, or whether I press
Control + 0 or Command + 0 on a Mac to zoom out.
At which point, I'll just go ahead and
press Control + Shift + A,
or Command + Shift + A on a Mac,
to once again deselect my artwork.
That is once again how you use
Document Raster Effects Settings
in order to control the resolution of your
soft effects, which include drop shadow, feather,
inner glow, and outer glow, here inside Illustrator.