Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Bible

Chapter 8. Creating, Selecting, and Editing Objects and Images

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating objects

• Selecting objects

• Organizing objects

• Filling and stroking objects

• Assigning color and gradients

• Working with transparency

• Editing objects

Creative Suite 5 documents have two groups of items: objects, which are editable and which include paths, shapes, type, and even multimedia elements, and images, which are pictures composed of an array of colored pixels. Although you have some crossover, you generally use Photoshop to work with images and Illustrator to work with objects. Most designs combine both of these items. Although all Creative Suite 5 applications use both objects and images and have similar tools, this chapter focuses mainly on Illustrator objects. Images in Photoshop are covered in Chapter 10. The other CS5 applications of InDesign, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Acrobat have some of the same features for working with objects and images that are found in these two applications.

Several topics apply equally to both objects and images such as color, gradients, and transparency. Although these topics are covered in this chapter on objects, they apply equally to images covered in a later chapter.

This chapter covers lots of ground, including creating objects, the tools used to select them, and a sampling of the features used to edit them. The tools used to edit objects are as diverse as the tools and commands used to create and select them.

Creating Objects in Illustrator

The most common Illustrator ...