Adjusting the opacity—now with shortcuts

- [Narrator] Over the course of this movie, I'll show you how you can vary the translucency of an object by adjusting it's opacity setting. And I'll also introduce you to a few key strokes that are available to those of you who loaded D keys, because they are going to make your life way easier. Over the course of this chapter were going to take this place photograph from the dreamstime image library about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. And we'll turn her into this kind of fashion treatment here, and we'll wrap things up by tattooing her face.

Now zoom this far out, this effect might look a little choppy. But as soon as we zoom in, things smooth out quite nicely. Now you'll be glad to know that I've drawn all the path outlines in advance, so that we can focus all of our attention on blend modes and opacity masks. All right, so I'm going to start things off here by deleting this dreamstime layer which I can do just by selecting it and clicking on the little trashcan icon in the bottom right corner of the layers panel and then I'll click the yes button in order to make it so.

Now I want you to notice what's going on here we have a lot of layers but just two of them are currently turned on. So we've got the place photograph and then in the background we have a big rectangle filled with a radial gradient. Now notice that I've masked the photograph, we first discussed clipping masks back in chapter 23 of the advanced course but because clipping masks are a transparency tool, that is to say, they allow you to define what's opaque and then what's transparent. I figured we'd quickly review the process. So I'm going to start things off just by clicking inside this woman's face and notice that she is surrounded by a path outline and then I'll go up to the object menu choose clipping mask and choose release, in order to expose the original photograph then I'll go ahead and press control shift A or command shift A on the Mac to deselect my artwork.

Now I just want you to see that this path outline here has no fill and a black one point stroke. All right I'll go ahead and put that back by pressing control Z or command Z on the Mac. Then I'll go ahead and select this place photograph by clicking on it and I'll press control X or command X on a Mac to cut it to the clip board. Then, you want to select the path outline and the easiest way to put the photograph inside of it is in my case to switch to the two column toolbox and then drop down to this draw inside icon and click on it.

Next, you want to go to the edit menu and choose paste and place, in order to place the image into the path outline and then finally you want to click on the draw normal icon, once again located at the bottom of the toolbox and then you can go ahead and switch back to the single column toolbox if you like. All right now you may recall, if you watched the live action introduction, that I said that blend modes and opacity masks live together in the opacity panel. The only problem with that is, there really isn't such a panel inside of Illustrator.

You can click on the word opacity, up here in the control panel, in order to bring up what's actually known as the transparency panel inside of Illustrator, otherwise everything I've said is true. We've got a list of blend modes right here and then we've got opacity mask function both of which we'll take a look at in future movies. But just so we have unfettered access to that panel, I'm going to go up to the window menu and I recommend you do this as well and choose the transparency command, if it has a check make in front of it that means it's already up on screen.

As we can see, over here to the right of the window. All right now notice even when the panel is collapsed, as it is right now, we can see this opacity value right there. If you can't see it for some reason you can expand the panel by clicking on this double arrow icon a few times. All right so notice, if I click on a word opacity then I'll highlight the value at 100% it is 100% opaque. At 50% we end up with a kind of 50/50 mix, so we are seeing 50% of the selected image and were revealing 50% of that purple gradient in the background.

If you dial in some other value, then you're going to get a different kind of mix. So if I take this opacity value all the way down to 20%, let's say, were seeing 20% image and 100% minus 20% or 80% background. And so higher opacity values are going to give you more opaque images and lower opacity values are going to give you more translucent images. And you can enter something like 33%, if you like, but you do have to work in whole number increments.

All the way down to, incidentally, 0% which will make the image entirely invisible. Now you might think why in the world would you do that, after all you want to see the image to some extent. Well we'll see uses for 0% opacity in future movies. Now, here's where things get a little more interesting in my opinion. If you loaded D keys, than you have some very easy shortcuts which are entirely borrowed from Photoshop. So if you tap the five key, you're going to set the opacity value to 50% so you don't even have to bother going over to this value and changing it, you just have to tap a key.

If you tap the eight key, you're going to set the opacity to 80% the nine key will take it to 90% and if you want to restore an opacity value of 100% you just tap the zero key. All right, and the same works down the keyboard if you tap the two key, you're going to set opacity value to 20% if you tap the one key, you'll get 10%. Now for those of you, who are working with American keyboards, if you cap the tilda key, which is just to the left of the one key you'll take the opacity value down to 0%.

So, there's no need by the way to press any modifiers you don't have to press control or command or anything like that, you just have to tap a number. Now in my case I'm interested in keeping the opacity at 100% for now so I'll go ahead and tap the zero key in order to make it so. And that friends, is how you modify the translucency of a selected object, whether it's a placed image or anything else you can create inside of Illustrator using the opacity value that's often found up here in the control panel.

It's always found in the transparency panel, here inside Illustrator.