I created a line and put a Guassian blur on it. I want to turn the total design into a .jpeg, however when you look at the design in Outline mode, there is a box that goes way beyond the line with the blur, and that is beyond the border of the design. When Exported as a .jpg, it creates a white area outside the area I need. I've tried Expand appearance, and Flatten Transparency, but the box remains. How do I get the extra white space to 'go away'?
Thanks ahead of time for your time responding.
Mick Samsel
Creative Services Signs and Screen Printing 221 W. Main St. Cherokee, Iowa 51012 712-225-2175 Cell:712-261-3823 biz883@mchsi.com
Posted by Gary Boros (Member # 8487) on :
Mick, I'm not sure of exactly what you mean but I tried recreating what you described by doing the following, I created a vector "line" by drawing a filled rectangle, then I applied a drop shadow (Guassian Blur), then I went to Object/Rasterize, then I exported as a JPG. It came out fine as expected. Now, whenever you export as a JPG from Illustrator you will get a white background, I'm not sure if that is the "white box" that you were talking about. Illustrator doesn't export transparency to my knowledge so you would have to edit in Photoshop to try to do something different if you need a transparent background.
Posted by Dave Sherby (Member # 698) on :
I agree with Gary. If you have Photoshop I would try to just crop out the extra white area and see if that fixes your problem.
Posted by Mick Samsel (Member # 311) on :
Draw a box, that box is your .jpg. Nothing can go outside it because there would be what's in your box, plus any white or negative space outside of the box, and that's not a finished product. I finally got a workaround. The line that I drew, and put a guassian blur on it, had a bounding box that went outside the the 'finished' product (box) jpg. How could I bring in that bounding box of the guassian blur, so it's inside the finished box (jpg)? I selected the line, selected Outline mode (Com Y on a Mac) > Effects > Document Raster Effects Settings, then down to the Options area, and at the Add ____ Around Object, I went from the .5 setting finally to .1, and the bounding box came inside of the finished box outline, which meant there wasn't something outside of it, so then I could create the .jpg, and the finished product was the box (outline or stroke) I drew with everything inside of it. That procedure might not work if the object with the guassian blue on it were too close to the finished edge, as the blur you want has to have a certain amount of 'Add ___ Around Object' to make the blur. Thanks Gary and Dave for typing in. I did speak with Gary yesterday, and passed along what worked. The first thought is to make a clipping mask, but Illustrator DOES NOT truly clip off and dispose of what you don't want - it's always there. Only Photosahop, Pixelmator and similar image manipulation programs will do that, I wanted to see if there was an easy way within Illustrator CS5 - it works for me!
