Opacity is "global" in Illustrator?

[Roger Breton]

I'm experimenting with Transparency.

I have one object which I want to set the "Fill" opacity to 50%.

The stroke should not change accordingly? But it does not seem to stay at 100% opacity?
What am I missing?

Looks like I can't set the Fill and Stroke opacity separately, such as in InDesign?

[Monika Gause]

You can do that.

Open the Appearance panel from the Window menu. There you can set opecity and blend mode different for stroke and fill.

[Roger Breton]

Dear Monika,

Is there a "trick" I am missing again? Here, as you can see, the Fill is set to Black 5% Opacity and the Stroke is set to 100% Opacity. I increased the Stroke size so that you can see what is going on: it does not seem to work :

[Ton Frederiks]

The Fill has the default opacity (as does the stroke), but both have a 5 % opacity in common.

[Roger Breton]

Got it! But it's very tricky. I tried many times to delete what seemed to be like the "Global" value, that would applu to both the Fill and Stroke to no avail, Illustrator kept applying the Opacity to both the Fill and Stroke, regardless of the Stroke Opacity being shown at "Default". 

 Thanks Tom!

[Kurt Gold]

Well, it's not that tricky as you may think.

In general, the rule is:

- If nothing or the Path item is highlighted in the Appearance palette, the opacity setting gets applied to both the stroke and the fill.

- To apply opacity settings separately you just have to highlight the desired items before you apply the setttings.

That's all. Pretty straightforward.

[Roger Breton]

It *is* tricky, Kurt. Far from intuitive. InDesign nails Opacity setting way better.

[Ton Frederiks]

It is the best tool in Illustrator, Roger, You can stack as many fills and strokes as you like on top of each other and  transform, filter and change their individual attributes in a non destructive way and save the rult as a Graphic Style.

Warning! it is addictive.

[Roger Breton]

I'm not complaining about the design or functionality of the Appearance panel. It is a wonderful tool. 
But the setting of Opacity leaves to be desired, in my opnion. I get the idea of applying Opacity to both the Fill and Stroke globally, in the Panel, as it makes it "obvious" but there are some "conditions" that prevent its performance in a truly controllable way. You can bet I'm going to just say this much to my student when refering to Opacity setting in Illustrator. It's not like I deal with Opacity settings day in and day out, Tom? So, it's possible I'm less than completely familiar to the "conditions" that direct the application of the setting to each or both attributes consistently. In contrast, I never had to "fuss" with the Transparency panel in InDesign to set Opacity. 

Maybe with "time" and "practice", I'll eventually get the hang of it but for the moment, it's not clear how the thing works. I'm otherwise very familiar with the workings of the Appearance palette, Tom.

[Ton Frederiks]

The big difference with InDesign is that InDesign works with objects that have a single fill and stroke.

Illustrator can have many and the opacity setting for the object is at the bottom and applied after all the settings for fills and strokes have been calculated.

[Roger Breton]

I love InDesign 🙂
I love Illustrator too 🙂
And I love Photoshop 🙂
Acrobat? Yes, but I confess I don't use it that much.

[Ton Frederiks]

We (at least I) all share the love (Acrobat yes, except the interface).

[Kurt Gold]

Roger,

if you want to apply transparency separately, the Appearance palette should look like this:

You have to deliberately highlight the stroke/fill items and then set the desired opacity.

[Jacob Bugge]

Roger,

With the Appearance palette, you can do many things, adding attributes and working with each individually by selecting it; you can read on here to get started,

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/appearance-attributes.html

The key to the differentiation is to