Work with raster effects in Illustrator

Scroll down to watch the accompanying video tutorial.

Adobe introduced the ability to use raster effects Illustrator CS2 and it’s been improving ever since. Used sparingly, raster effects can help you achieve results in your Illustrator vectors that you’d normally have to cross over to Photoshop to get. If you experiment with them, they can add a dramatic difference and new dimension to your images – and so long as you take care not to overdo it, they can speed up your workflow.

Be careful, though – if you use effects too heavily they’ll slow down the application and the processing time will drive you crazy, so if you’re looking to produce heavily layered raster work, Photoshop is still the place to do it. In this tutorial, I’ll show you the basics of how to use raster effects to transform your vectors.

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