Prevent illustrator from selecting an object by clicking on its shadow
Currently Illustrator will select an object if you click on its shadow. It's quite annoying wanting to select an object affected by another object's shadow, and ending up selecting the object casting the shadow instead.
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21 comments
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Brad Sharp
commented
Neeraj Nandkeolyar Has found the solution guys.... It's not massively ideal that we can only select edges but it's helped a lot.
"Neeraj Nandkeolyar (Sr. Product Manager, Adobe Illustrator) commented · There is a setting in that may help in case of large glow/shadows. Preferences > Selection & Anchor Display > Object Selection by Path Only.Enabling this option will disable clicks on appearances (fill/strokes/effects) from selecting the object. Only paths can be used for selection."
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Anonymous
commented
please fix this! Horrible to work with
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Vernon Zehr
commented
This is unforgivable. I've been reading so many complaints. It took me half an hour to figure out what was "broken" in Illustrator preventing me from selecting objects. I too have some huge drop shadows blocking EVERY **** OBJECT BELOW ONE LAYER! EVERYTHING! I can't select ONE **** THING below a few small objects because of a drop shadow.
This is insane. Does anyone at Adobe actually try and use their own programs??? How could this be going on for an ENTIRE YEAR with no one actually acknowledging it or fixing it????
FIX THIS **** THING ALREADY!!!! I am paying a fracking fortune. It's stuff like this that makes many people look at much cheaper, equally feature rich alternatives like Krita or Affinity.
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Anonymous
commented
please give us the option to change this behavior
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Anonymous
commented
DEAR ADOBE. HAVE YOU BEEN RECEIVING MY PAYMENTS AND FEEDBACK FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS? GOOD. FIX THE ******* PROBLEM THEN. THANK YOU.
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Amadeusz W
commented
This type of problem exists from the moment Adobe brought shadows etc into illustrator... why it works this way? Who knows...probably it was easier to implement and team is to lazy to fix it.
Please dont write that it is complex...in PS it works fine, its not hard to seperate effects (even fills and strokes) from path INNER area.
Solution by selecting by path only is a joke. Who am I? Surgeon?
From comments below i can see that there was a version when it was working properly. Can anyone provide me info which version it was? Thanks in advance :)
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Souheil
commented
Please allow us to toggle the feature off!
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Ethan
commented
PLEASE, for the love of all that is good, remove this evil or at least give us an option to toggle this feature on or off. It's literally giving me a migraine working on multiple objects with large shadows, forcing me to separate them on multiple layers and locking the ones I don't want to select.
Why, why, why would anyone who has used illustrator ever suggest such an addition? It makes me wonder what the Adobe team is thinking when they rolled this out. Ridiculous. Fixes nothing, adds 10x the frustration.
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Anonymous
commented
I'm also having this kind of "feature" in Illustrator CC 2020 (24.0.1) on Windows 10.
I don't know but recently I'm having a headache over Illustrator "features" that doesn't let me do the simple basic task such as selecting objects.
I'm hoping that in the future release they remove these "features". -
Anonymous
commented
still no hope I suppose. this is getting annoying...
okay, looks like I'm downgrading version... -
Anonymous
commented
Stop selecting objects when I click on an effect.
I have a rectangle with a long, soft drop shadow. I now can no longer select anything that is technically 'under' the drop shadow, because clicking on the drop shadow selects the object casting it. This is really really bad and extremely counterintuitive.
I'm smart enough to know which object is casting the shadow because I put it there. If I wanted to select the object casting the shadow, I would have clicked on it. Now I can't click on the thing I really want to click on — all the shapes' clickable areas are wildly overlapping and I need to re-order my layers just to click.
All this feature does is let me move an object by ~not~ clicking on it.
Awful.
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Anonymous
commented
I've just updated Illustrator and this is killing me. What a strange strange feature to introduce. Needs to be removed ASAP.
It's horrible. It's like scroll-jacking, where some JS won't let me scroll the way I want to scroll. This feature won't let me click where I want to click. An effect is just an effect — it shouldn't be a default selectable object, especially given how long and soft our shadows are these days. Need this one resolved ASAP!
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Charlotte
commented
100% this. Took me a while to even figure out what was happening, as I couldn't see that I was clicking on a drop shadow – I was just like 'why am I selecting that object over there, when I'm literally 30px away?! WTF'. So, yes please to making this a preference!
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Miles Stevens
commented
Yes this is utterly dumb. Probably one of the top Illustrator behaviors that I'm prepared to be downright mean about, which is not a normal thing for me. I'm a very nice person. But I can't think of an instance where I've thought "oh, thank goodness, I can select this object by it's shadow/glow/whatever!"
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That's right - it can get fairly complex and un-predictable. An appearance (effect) overlapping the basic fill / stroke can come in the way. And some appearances like dashed-lines, inside-stroke, variable-width, etc. get applied from outside of the Effects menu.
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No, selecting object by path' only is not 'the same as 'click-through raster effects'.
Make at least option 'don't select by external appearance', please. I would prefer even more complex way, by separating raster and vector effects to be sensitive for clicking, but this will get things to complicated, I afraid. -
There is a setting in that may help in case of large glow/shadows. Preferences > Selection & Anchor Display > Object Selection by Path Only.
Enabling this option will disable clicks on appearances (fill/strokes/effects) from selecting the object. Only paths can be used for selection.
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Nikola
commented
I agree that this needs to be implemented as a preference to turn it on and off.
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Anonymous
commented
I like the option.. maybe just set it as a preference to turn it on and off
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Andrew B
commented
This is super annoying, and inconsistent with InDesign.
