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Effects do not rotate (drop shadow) or scale (e.g: gaussian blur)

If you create a logo and use the drop shadow effect, the values will scale but not rotate.IN packaging design we often rotate the logo for every panel on a carton. After you rotate the logo you must manually change the values to for example get the most popular bottom right drop shadow on all logos.

Gaussian blur can be sued to make a your own drop shadow effect, but that has another problem in that the blur amount will not adjust.

If you search your home or local supermarket, you will eventual find items that went incorrectly to press, identifying this being done in Adobe Illustrator.

My expectation is that the drop shadow would rotate. I understand this may be difficult to accomplish to angled logos, but for 90° rotations would be very helpful.

43 votes
Mike Gondek shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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  • Brian Collins commented  ·   ·  Report

    Still backlogged since 2016? This is still an issue in CC 2022.

  • Alexis Obando commented  ·   ·  Report

    This issue its very critical, and you can not solve this?. In flexography industry, we work rotating artes every single day. Obviously we have the experience to do that, but, what about the noobs?. Really, you havo to solve this, ours jobs depends for this solution in some cases.

  • pancho commented  ·   ·  Report

    For me expand works before scaling or doing any other transformation

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    This issue has not been solved as of June 2020. In package printing industry, this is very importanting issue.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    work around is to expand / expand appearance before rotation - while we wait for this feature

  • anonym commented  ·   ·  Report

    As of jan 2020 still no update, i solved this by creating a Static symbol of just the object with the drop shadow effect (will not work on linked files) and then rotate the whole thing i was going to rotate.
    working in packaging to..

    hot key for create symbol is f8.

  • Gary Crispin commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hi Egor,

    Not exactly. For instance when we build a pack, our client insists we build it orientated landscape, but our print proofers insist on portrait. So we have issues as when rotate an entire artwork we find that drop shadows are now angled differently and we then have to amend each one individually. Sometimes this can be hundreds of items and across many files, leaving us open to many mistakes. Then we have to repeat the process when we receive the proofers adjusted files back.
    Also sometime we are required to show a larger scaled version of the artwork. So youd think that a select all and scale 500% would produce a 5x version of the original. However any gaussian blurs do not scale, despite selecting 'scale appearances and effects'. It's very frustrating.

  • AdminEgor Chistyakov (Admin, Adobe Illustrator) commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hm. I rotate with another Transform effect to change direction. It's not a bug, it's kinda obvious correct behaviour, but it would be nice feature request. But think about more transformative transformation — like Skew — how effect should behave then?

    Also blur is set by pixels (which is bound to Raster Effect Settings), and Feather to document units (which is not). Both behaviours are useful, but I agree that both effects should allow to use both ways to set value. Please log it as Feature request.

  • rlowers commented  ·   ·  Report

    As of June 2019, this shadow rotation issue has not been fixed in Illustrator CC. I also work in packaging and need to rotate logos for various side panels. In the past, you created a symbol of the logo plus shadow and it rotated perfectly 180 or 90 degrees. Today I had to flip a logo 180 degrees and manually correct the shadow.

  • Artworker82 commented  ·   ·  Report

    When you have an appearance (i.e. transform with move horizontal 1mm) and then rotate the object, it doesn't change the direction of the applied appearance. Our client insists that we cannot expand the appearances so it causes issues when applying to carton where the front and back panels are the same.

    We also have similar issues with things like scaling objects with a gaussian blur effect applied, where it does not scale the number of pixels.

    However feathering appearance does scale, so the application seems inconsistent.

    There should be an option in the preferences as to whether rotation and scaling is applied to appearance effects or not.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    I lost a client design to a kid who pulled a low res icon off the web and then handed it to me to recreate so it was usable. I cannot rotate the drop shadow so that it matches the original. That sucks.

  • David Mikal Johnson commented  ·   ·  Report

    Often in packaging design, if I've set up a logo or live type with effects, I need to rotate that logo or type to read correctly on whichever panel it rests and have the drop shadow or offset outline (as in the example) remain in a consistent position to the object itself, and not, as illustrator defaults, consistent to the canvas.

    Up through CC 2017 I used the workaround of making the Logo a symbol. This allowed the effects to remain consistent to the object. Then Adobe, er... "fixed" that with CC2018 and now the effects stay consistent to the canvas when embedded in the symbol.

Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests: Effects, Appearance, Graphic Styles

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