- In this movie we'll set off the magnifying glass from
it's background by assigning this drop shadow to
an entire layer.
And, while this is a little bit conceptually extravagant at
this point, it's actually really easy to pull off.
So, I'm going to go ahead and switch back to
our document so far,
and I'm going to click on the angled layer to select it.
And then, what I want you to do is,
notice this little circle right over here in
the right hand column.
That allows you to target that specific item.
And in this case, what we're going to do is
target this entire layer by clicking on that circle.
You should see, not only this orange square,
which tells us that we have selected paths on this layer,
but you also see a second circle around the first one
which tell us that the layer has been targeted.
All right, now what I want you to do is,
go up to the Effect menu, choose Stylize,
and then choose Drop Shadow.
That will bring up the Drop Shadow dialogue box.
Now, by default, you're going to see
X Offset, Y Offset, and Blur all set to five points.
All I want you to do is take them all three down to
four points instead.
So, we've got a Mode of Multiply, don't worry about that,
that just darkens things up.
We have an Opacity value of 75%,
and then we have X Offset, Y Offset,
and Blur values of four points apiece.
If you want to see what that looks like
go ahead and turn on the preview check box.
And by virtue of the fact that the entire layer is targeted,
the various items on the layer are not
interacting with each other.
In other words, the black portion of the handle isn't
casting a shadow on the metallic portion of
the handle, and so forth.
Instead, the entire layer is casting a drop shadow on the
stars and the red and blue shapes behind it.
At which point you can go ahead and click OK
in order to apply that effect.
Now, remember how, when we first created the document
by going to the file menu and chosing the New command,
remember how the Raster Effects are set to just 72 ppi,
and I was telling you way back when
that Raster Effects are anything that
can convert it to pixels,
which is what happens with drop shadows.
Drop shadows, because they are soft,
get converted to pixels on the fly.
So, I want you to see what that looks like.
I'm just going to go ahead and zoom in here,
quite far, in order to see if I can make out a single pixel.
So, even though this is an extremely low res drop shadow,
which is why it applied so quickly incidentally,
it just so happens to look great even when
I am zoomed in to 3200%.
Which means that it is going to print nicely, as well.
All right, so I'm just going go ahead and zoom out
and then click off those paths to deselect them.
And that, very simply, is how you assign a drop shadow to
an entire layer here inside Illustrator.