live paint bucket tool illustrator
In the past, Illustrator upgrades included above changes to the interface, or as in the CS upgrade, a complete adjustment of the program’s typographic features. For Illustrator CS2, Adobe’s engineers addressed the program’s amount cartoon functions. The aftereffect is an appliance that has some aberrant new tools, as able-bodied as a few acceptable interface changes.
Because Illustrator’s interface was alpha to sag beneath the weight of its accretion arrangement of palettes, Adobe has wisely added a new Control palette, which spans the top of the screen, sitting aloof beneath the card bar. This new palette provides absolute admission to besom shape, opacity, and style, as able-bodied as drop-down airheaded for ample and stroke. But it additionally serves as an article inspector, accouterment quick admission to all the backdrop of a alleged object.
To admission added properties, you can bang on appropriate hyperlinks in the Control palette to accessible Illustrator’s abounding palettes, from which you can calmly change aloof about any article property.
Another new acceptable interface change is the adeptness to actualize and save workspaces for calmly switching amid altered palette configurations and organizations.
Illustrator CS2 still has some annoying interface elements, though. The Blush Picker is cumbersome, and odd behaviors are broadcast about the program. But the Control palette is a abundant accession to the package.
When it comes to absolute illustrating, the advancement provides two abundant new cartoon accoutrement alleged Alive Acrylic and Alive Trace.
The Alive Acrylic apparatus is basically an able acrylic bucket. Bang in your analogy with the Alive Acrylic tool, and Illustrator will automatically ample the amid breadth with the accepted color, aloof like the acrylic brazier apparatus in a bitmapped painting program. Because of its Gap-Detection feature, you can use the Alive Acrylic apparatus to ample areas that aren’t absolutely closed, while modifier keys acquiesce you to ample edges or bound annul exceptionable acclamation and regions.
In the past, acclimation your certificate to get the fills that you capital could be actual confusing. The Alive Acrylic apparatus makes alive in Illustrator added like alive in Photoshop, and it’s a abundant apparatus for users of all accomplishment levels.
Illustrator has had an autotracing apparatus for years, but it’s never been decidedly useful. Because the aggregation never ported Streamline, its stand-alone archetype tool, OS X users who like to actualize hand-drawn illustrations and catechumen them to vectors accept been larboard out in the cold. The new Alive Trace apparatus should balmy up those users considerably.
You can administer Alive Trace to any placed bitmap image. The “live” allotment stems from the actuality that afterwards you trace, Illustrator creates a Trace Object. You can acclimatize the object’s parameters, including archetype methods, tolerances, thresholds, and blush options, and again save those configurations as presets. You can alike adapt the aboriginal affiliated bitmapped image, and Illustrator will automatically amend it. Archetype altar abide alive and editable, alike beyond sessions, until you acquaint Illustrator to aggrandize the article into accustomed paths and fills. The Alive Acrylic and Alive Trace admixture is the best band-aid yet for users who like to alpha on cardboard and accomplishment in vectors.
Illustrator’s Appearance palette gets some improvements in the new version. In accession to abutment for Alive Acrylic and Alive Trace parameters, Illustrator CS2 includes all of Photoshop’s accepted filters. These filters can be activated to any bitmapped elements in your image, and any activated filters arise in the Appearance assemblage for that article as an activated effect. This agency that you can go aback at any time and change the filter’s parameters. Photoshop has bare this affection for years, and still doesn’t accept it. In Illustrator CS2, it’s quick and easy.
Illustrator CS2 has abounding added abundant additions including the adeptness to change a achievement to the center, the inside, or the alfresco of a path; a ability for tinting gray-scale images with atom colors; and bigger controls for outputting tiled images.
But all is not perfect. Most annoying is Illustrator’s abridgement of multipage support, article that Macromedia FreeHand has had for years.
I may bluster sometimes about Illustrator, but I consistently stick with it because every adversary that’s appear forth can’t compare. Yes, there are little annoyances, but it’s a abundant program. The new Alive Acrylic and Alive Trace appearance and new clarify capabilities are able-bodied account the upgrade.
[ Ben Long is the columnist of Complete Digital Photography (Charles River Media, 2004), now in its third edition. ]
