transparency

I realize I owe you lovers of the graphic arts a Part 2 to my Illustrator Transparency, Photoshop Resolve article. (If that sounds familiar, it's because I copied and pasted that sentence from last week.) But given that not a single person has expressed a problem with my delaying Part 2 -- which makes me cry real, actual, enormous crocodile tears (below) -- I'm guessing you're okay waiting.

In the meantime, I discovered something quite by chance today that made me geek out and do the d'oh, slap-my-head, I-can't-believe-I-never-figured-that-out-before thing.

Here's the idea: Photoshop does not let you blur live text. Well, all right, that's a lie. Photoshop does let you blur live text if you first convert the text to a smart object. But that's a Big Italicized If. Converting text to a smart object restricts your access to it and requires you to edit the text in a separate window, which is an increduloppus painoloopamus in the hippopotamus. Read more » 

In this two-part article, we’ll take a low-quality digital photo of my youngest son, Sammy, banging on a hopelessly busted piano:

And transform it into a work of otherworldly vector-based weirdness (below bottom). The primary instrument of this transformation will be Adobe Illustrator’s Transparency palette. But while Illustrator can belt out a medley, can it carry a tune? The answer is, yes, so long as Photoshop oversees the final production.

Here's the idea: Illustrator allows you to assign varying levels of transparency to vector-based objects. That’s great because, as we’ll see, it makes for a remarkably versatile drawing environment. The problem is, Adobe's original vector-based technology, PostScript, doesn’t accommodate transparency. And given that PostScript has long been and continues to be the professional-level commercial reproduction standard, this conflict seems to raise a red flag: How can Illustrator make art that PostScript can't print? Read more »