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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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Anonymous shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

16 comments

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  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    DEAR ADOBE. HAVE YOU BEEN RECEIVING MY PAYMENTS AND FEEDBACK FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS? GOOD. FIX THE ******* PROBLEM THEN. THANK YOU.
  • Amadeusz W commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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 :)
  • Ethan commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.
  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    still no hope I suppose. this is getting annoying...
    okay, looks like I'm downgrading version...
  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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!
  • Charlotte commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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!
  • Miles Stevens commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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!"
  • Egor Chistyakov commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.
  • AdminNeeraj Nandkeolyar (Product Manager, Adobe Illustrator) commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.
  • Nikola commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I agree that this needs to be implemented as a preference to turn it on and off.

Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests: User Interface

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