Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

I say “outside chance” because, these days, it’s unlikely. Transpar-

ency fi rst appeared in Illustrator 9, which was six versions and

more than a decade ago. This coincided with the introduction of

transparency to version 1.4 of Adobe’s Portable Document Format

(PDF), which has largely supplanted the limited confi nes of Post-

Script. By default, every AI fi le includes a PDF description. Which

means that, if your translucent objects fail to print properly to a

PostScript printer (again, unlikely), you can rasterize the AI fi le in

a PDF-savvy program such as Photoshop, and the work of your

printer will be done.

I bring this up because I want you to look upon transparency in

Illustrator as your extremely powerful friend. You can use it—you

should use it—without fear of it interfering with the viability of your

artwork. And if printing somehow presents a problem, you can al-

ways export your artwork for use in Photoshop, which (based on

my experience with thousands of fi les) always produces accurate

results, as I’ll document in Lesson 12, “Printing and Exporting.”

In any event, rest assured: Illustrator’s brand of transparency is

practical, it’s adaptable, and it works.

Opacity and Knockout Group

This lesson features one elaborate project fi le, in which we’ll build

on a base image (Figure 8-3 on the facing page) to create a multi-

layered photo illustration (Figure 8-4). I’ve drawn all ...