Adobe Illustrator CS6 Part L

This is the 12th and last installment in my blog post series on Adobe Illustrator CS6 which is based on what I learn from the video training course by Infinite Skills on this software. If you want to create a blend from one shape to another choose Object/Blend/Make & you also have the option of Object/Blend/Options, which is more configurable. You can specify how many steps it should take and this has applications in animation in Flash Movies where you export to Flash but we won't cover that here. The Mesh tool can create a kind of 3d type gradient usually in white when applied to a shape. It uses complicated algorithms to achieve this. The steps are you select the Mesh tool, then the color & then where you want it applied. You can shift click and apply the mesh effect to more than one area at once. The Save For Web option is to optimize a page for the web or for a program like Powerpoint. As part of the process it compresses the file and shows a preview so you can see if the quality is degraded. A web page will usually use RGB color. Commercial printing requires CMYK color. As part of the process in optimizing your page you choose a filetype. GIF is likely to be phased out soon in favor of PNG-8 and both have a transparency option but it is a matter of the web browsers supporting it. You can reduce the colors especially where a drawing is predominantly solid colors. You click save when finished. If it is a photo or photo-like you normally use JPEG although it doesn't have a transparent option so normally you will choose white or black instead. PNG-24 is lossless and keeps the quality but does reduce the file size although not to the same extent as other file types. If you save something as a PDF you choose Save As and select PDF from the file type. To print something you will usually double click the artboard tool and configure the various options. That brings us to the end of this series and I hope you have enjoyed reading it.