- [Instructor] In this movie,
I'll show you how to limit your blending
within the confines of a group or layer
using the isolate blending option,
and along the way we'll give our model some striped glasses.
All right, so I'll go ahead
and switch over to my document in process here.
And notice this glasses layer.
I'll go ahead and turn it on.
And you can see that it contains a bunch of rectangles
and circles.
Now, I've gone ahead and combined the rectangles
and each pair of circles into a compound path,
and I did that just by selecting them
and then going up to the Object menu,
choosing Compound Path,
and choosing Make.
And while that is not the least bit necessary,
you don't have to do that,
it is going to make this exercise a little more convenient.
All right, so at this point,
the rectangles are in the proper location,
and I'm going to start
by aligning the rose-colored circles to them.
So I'll Shift + click on the circles, like so,
and then, just so the rectangles don't move,
I'll click on them again
in order to turn them into the key object.
And now I'll click on the word Align
up here in the control panel
and select horizontal align center.
Now, at this point,
it looks as if the rectangles are no longer the key object,
but that's just an interface bug.
Everything's working just fine.
And so all you need to do now is click vertical align center
and you will get the alignment we're looking for.
All right, now these white circles may prove
to be a little bit distracting,
so I'm going to twirl open the glasses layer
and turn them off,
at which point you can see, sure enough,
those rectangles remain the key object.
All right, now I'm going to zoom in on them,
and I'm going to click off the artwork to deselect it.
Now, these circles happen to be on top of the rectangles.
You can see that's the case here inside the layers panel.
And so what I want to do is blend them,
along with the rectangles,
to create a kind of stripe effect.
And I'm going to do that by clicking on the word Normal
up here in the transparency panel
and changing the blend mode to multiply,
and I end up with this effect here.
And while it works great where the stripes are concerned,
you can see that we are getting some nice stripe action,
I'm also multiplying through to the model's eyes,
and that is not what I want.
And so to limit that blending,
I'm going to go ahead and Shift + click on the rectangles
so that both the circles and the rectangles are selected,
and then I'll go up to the Object menu
and choose the Group command,
or of course you can just press Control + G
or Command + G on the Mac.
Now, in and of itself,
that doesn't do anything,
and that's because blend modes naturally travel
outside of groups and layers
to all the various objects behind them.
And so what you need to do with that group targeted,
so make sure you're seeing a double circle
around the meatball over there
on the right-hand side of the panel.
Then go up to the transparency panel.
If necessary, expand it all the way, like so,
and then turn on the Isolate Blending checkbox,
and that is going to limit the blending,
as we're seeing right there.
So all of the blending is now happening inside the group
and none of it is escaping.
All right, now we need to bring in the white circles,
so I'll go ahead and turn them on.
And they're located down here, by the way.
I need to align them,
so I'll go ahead and Shift + click
on that group right there,
and I'll click on it again to make it the key object.
And then I'll click on the word Align
up here in the control panel,
I'll select horizontal align center,
and despite what we're seeing,
that group is still the key object,
so I'll select vertical align center, as well.
All right, now just so I can give you
a better sense of what's going on,
I'm going to hide the group
so we can just focus on the white circles.
And I decided to turn them into lenses
by first grabbing the eyedropper,
which you can get by pressing the I key,
and I want to lift a shade of purple from the background.
Now, if I just click in that background,
I'm going to load those shapes with the gradient,
which is not really what I want to do.
I just want to grab a single flat color.
So I'll undo that change.
And your fill needs to be active, by the way,
for this to work.
And then I will Shift + click on the purple background,
and that will load that specific color under my cursor.
And so it could be anything.
I could Shift + click on her face, for example,
in order to load something resembling that shade of rose
that I'm using for the stripes.
But I want purple,
so I'll Shift + click back here.
And then I decided to change the blend mode to different
just to see what would happen,
and I ended up getting a pretty cool effect.
The problem is that the transitions are too harsh.
In which case,
as I was telling you earlier,
if you kind of like difference,
but it's not quite what you're looking for,
then you can switch to exclusion.
And in our case,
that gives us a much smoother effect,
and it's analogous to screen once again.
Screen's going to give you a totally different color scheme,
but it is going to give you similarly smooth color transitions.
All right, now I'll just press the B key
to switch back to my black arrow tool
and I'll turn on the group.
And which point you may notice
that we're no longer highlighting the eyes
because these stripes are getting in the way.
Now, I want you to notice something about the group.
I'm going to go ahead and meatball it here
in the layers panel,
and I want you to notice this knockout group checkbox.
It has a dash in it.
So it's currently set to its neutral setting.
And I want you to remember that
because it makes a big difference.
Now what I'm going to do is meatball the glasses layer,
and I'm going to turn on the knockout group checkbox,
and watch what happens.
We reveal those eyes in the background.
So blend modes penetrate just as surely
as reduced opacity values.
The problem is I've lost any interaction in the group,
and let me show you why that is.
I'll click off those items to deselect them,
and then I'll select the grouped objects,
and notice our knockout group is still set to dash,
which means because it's neutral,
it's accepting the knockout group setting
assigned to the layer.
Because after all,
because the layer contains the group,
it's the dominant container.
So what you need to do is select the group,
and then now notice for some reason
that the knockout group checkbox is on.
What you want to do is turn it off.
And so you'll need to click that checkbox.
It appears a couple of times,
but make sure the group has isolate blending turned on
but knockout group turned off.
And we end up with this effect right here.
And that's how you limit your blending
within the confines of a single group or layer
using the isolate blending checkbox,
as well as how you create a playful design
using a combination of two knockout group settings,
one turned on and the other turned off.