adobe illustrator keyboard shortcuts exit isolation

Open your Appearance panel and from the Appearance panel flyout menu, choose Add New Stroke. The image is selected (if your image already exists in your document, select it now).The method I’m about to show you will do just that, and will also do the job for rectangles as well. But what if your image had transparent areas in it? What if you silhouetted the photo in Photoshop (keeping the background transparent) and placed the PSD into Illustrator? There is a way to apply a stroke to the boundary of the art instead of to the boundary of the entire image. This technique obviously works only if your keyline is rectangular in shape. If you then add this style to your NDPs, it will be readily available in all new files that you create. With the object still selected, open the Graphic Styles panel and click the New Graphic Style button at the bottom of the panel. Now make this easier to apply in the future.

Style the stroke attribute to match your design preference. (Be careful not to press Tab after you enter the second value, or it will switch back to Absolute.) Click OK to apply the effect. Check the Preview button, select the Relative option, and set both the Extra Width and Extra Height to zero (0). With the Stroke highlighted in the Appearance panel, choose Effect > Convert to Shape > Rectangle.We can’t see the stroke yet, because all we have is an image. The image is selected (or if your image already exists in your document, select it).Once you’ve chosen the image, click the Place button. Choose File > Place and select an image to place into your Illustrator document.There are two separate effects that we can use, and each provides a different benefit. But let’s get on with the styles, shall we? I don’t have answers to either of those questions (sorry). Go ahead, ask me why Adobe doesn’t allow us to assign keyboard shortcuts to styles like InDesign does. Go ahead, ask me why Adobe doesn’t ship Illustrator with such an effect as a default setting in the NDPs (New Document Profiles). But we all know that once we’ve applied an effect, we can store it as a Graphic Style, at which point applying our keyline will become a single click. This method works wonderfully when you’re using the Selection tool (black arrow) and have the Bounding Box option turned on (in the View menu).Īt first, it may seem that applying a keyline with the use of an Effect is a tedious process. When you’re done, double click outside the image to exit isolation mode and continue working. Now click on the frame edge and resize at will. Once you’ve created your mask, you can decide to “crop” your image by double clicking anywhere on the photo. NOTE: An additional benefit to this method of using a mask is that you now have the elements in place to simulate a “frame and image” paradigm like InDesign. This gives the mask a black 1 pt stroke attribute. This creates a mask at the exact bounds of the image. The image is selected (if your image already exists in your document, select it now), so if you look in your Control panel at the top of the screen, you’ll see a button labeled “MASK”.Choose File > Place and choose an image to place into your Illustrator document.This technique requires Illustrator CS3 and works only when your keyline will be rectangular in shape. Both have pros and cons and work better depending on the task at hand. There are two ways to accomplish this: have Illustrator automatically create a mask for the image or use an effect to convert the bounds of the object into a vector object. But I don’t want to create that object on my own. So we’ll need to create another vector object to contain our stroke attribute. But even that’s too much work.įirst, it’s important to understand that a placed image is not a vector object and hence, can’t have a fill or stroke attribute. Most people use the Rectangle tool to draw a shape around the image. It’s not a vector shape and therefore lacks those attributes.

A placed image in Illustrator isn’t an object that can have Fills or Strokes. Unlike InDesign, which has a concept of frames (and the frames have Fill and Stroke attributes), Illustrator is frameless. I placed a picture into my document, and I want to add a stroke around it. I’m having a problem with Illustrator that seems pretty basic, but I can’t figure it out.

Adobe illustrator keyboard shortcuts exit isolation