Expert: Amy - 10/25/2007

Question
Hi

I have been asked to produce the artwork for a pop-up display and am using Illustrator CS2.  It is approximately 3 meters in height, and 4 meters in width.  I have created a blue rectangle so that it has a blue background, and have added the company logo.  The next thing is images.  The images I am using are high resolution due to the size of the display, however, I want to feather the edges of the images, but this does not work.  You can select the option, and tell it to feather, but it actually makes no difference to the image.  I also tried appliing effects to the images such as charcoal etc. but only some worked.  Any ideas what this could be or how it can be resolved?

Thanks,

Jo

Answer
I would have to agree with you, Joanna. It could very well be the extremely large size of the images.

If it were me, I guess I'd work in scale. I don't know how much difference that will make. What I mean is set up the document at 40 cm x 30 cm and have the printer enlarge it?  All the vector elements will be fine. You can scale your images down once placed in Illustrator and they will retain their original resolution, causing them to print at very high resolution when printed at 40cm x 30cm but at the correct resolution when printed at the right scale.

But it could also be preferences gone crazy. Follow the instructions for resetting the prefs.
1 - Quit AI
2 - Locate the AIPrefs file on your machine and move it to the desktop.
3 - Restart Illustrator.

If it works, you can throw away the copy of AI prefs you moved to the desktop. If it does nothing, you can QUIT AI again and move that file back to where it was, overwriting the new file that will have been created in its place.

Another way to go would be to do all the fancy effects work in PhotoShop, then linking the images into the Illustrator document instead of embedding them. I know this only works if the backgrounds and other elements in your AI document allow it.

I do have one question - are you entering a large enough number in the feather edges dialog? Feathers go into the image, not out, and at the scale you're working in, you need a big number. Well, let me know if this helps any.
Amy Pace