armadillo

I would select the blues, then invert, tint with the color hue of the sky, and finally average the image.

I am somewhat embarrassed to ask this question, but I have a hard time working with bitmaps. Sometimes I paste a simple bitmap into an AD document and simply want to remove the background. For example, I may have a product on a white background and I want to remove the white background to make it transparent. Typically, coming from Fireworks, I would use the Selection Brush and then simply hit the delete key and be done. I have no idea how to accomplish this in AD. The only way to do this that I have discovered is to invert the selection and then use a Mask Layer followed by rasterizing it to retain just the object. Similarly, I have not been able to copy a selection made in a bitmap and paste just the selection into the same document. Making a selection followed by copy and then paste simply copies the entire bitmap. How can I copy just the selection? In AP at least there is a copy merged command, but how do I accomplish such a trivial task in AD?

I like your avatar ;)

+1,000,000 bump bump bump PRETTY PLEASE

Just follow the instructions. Right-click on the image and select "Print Guilloche" from the popup menu. Then in the dialog that comes up, select to save as PDF. Open the PDF in AD and you will have all the vector objects available for editing.

You can also generate such patterns very quickly online here: http://2008.sub.blue/projects/guilloche.html Added bonus, you can get them as vectors if you print to PDF instead of saving as JPG.

Yes, I have tried exporting and I see no problems with either PNG or TIFF. While PNG does not support Pantone, TIFF should work. Hopefully, the OP can chime in. If he indeed needs to provide a vector file, then AD won't be able to retain full editability as text.

One of us is misunderstanding the intent of the question then. If the printing house doesn't care about transparency, then I assume that the file will be rendered as a PNG or TIFF with transparency. The printing house will then receive the TIFF for printing or an EPS/PDF rendered from the TIFF/PNG. As I understand it, the OP just wanted to retain editability for himself, not the printing house. But I may misunderstand what he wants.

Sure, but what is the problem with that? I thought the idea was to preserve editability and saving the file in AD retains that feature. The OP specifically stated that the printing house does not care about transparency.

See attached file. It uses 3 text elements layered such that the middle element is set to "Erase" to allow transparency. outlines.afdesign

You could use a stroke for the text and then add an outline effect. See attached doc. outlines.afdesign

Actually, Fireworks has a command for this kind of thing. It's called Twist and Fade and works great. Could be a nice addition to AD.

The last two approaches are nice solutions. Could someone post a strategy to use a shape for the arcs so that one can style both stroke and fill. Does AD have a mechanism to convert a stroke (as done in the last method) into a shape? In Fireworks, there is a command called "Expand stroke" which will generate an outline of a stroke with both a fill and a stroke.

So I tried to create the requested shape a different way: Create three concentric circles. Then overlay a pie with missing pie segment essentially leaving three lines exposed. I then divided the 3 circles with the pie. Then I got stuck with three shapes that are essentially pie segments. Is there an easy way to convert these shapes to open paths?

Shapes are pretty much covered, but may be we could get Illustrator tools such as grids, circular/elliptical grids, and spirals (linear and progressive)?

When importing or placing bitmaps in AD, they have an original state (size, rotation, etc). This state obviously changes with transformations (e.g. resized, flipped, rotated). Sometimes, I would like to remove these transformations for this particular object without erasing the entire file's history. It would be great to have an option to remove the transformations of the bitmap. At a minimum, I would like to know the original dimensions of the bitmap when imported.

I have to say that this is a very nice community helping users at all levels to accomplish what they want to do. Thank you all for taking the time to help fellow AD users.

Why not use the stroke property? You have full control over miter, join, and align properties.

If you can live with a workaround, Inkscape can open .cdr files and export them to formats readable by AD.

That would be a nice feature to have. May be taking the Fireworks way of stacking effects could serve as inspiration. I can work around this limitation by creating a group and then apply a subsequent effect to the group, but having flexible ordering would be much more elegant.

I'm a bit hesitant to ask such a trivial question, but I have not been able to find a solution to this. Is there a way to change the order of layer effects? A simple example would be to create a white outline to an object and then apply an outer shadow that includes the white outline. I have tried moving the effects, but they don't move. This surely must be a trivial thing, but I simply cannot figure out how to do it.

Wow, just tried that and it did fix the problem. Good to know this trick.

No beta installed. I just installed on second Mac and there it works both ways. Very strange indeed. May be a re-install can fix this. Will try that tomorrow. Thanks for the quick replies.

That helps, but for some reason I cannot see that menu item enabled in AD... ever. Interestingly, if I save the file in AD and then open it in AP, I see the corresponding menu item (Edit in Designer) enabled and I can transfer the document to AD. Why is this option disabled for me in AD?

Coming from Fireworks, there is an option to use a healing brush similar to the one found in AP. But this is missing in AD. Will this be implemented at some point? Or am I missing it somewhere in hidden options?