Removing a part of Shadow

[Mohsen5EA5]

Hi

I have placed a photo into the Illustrator. So I created a shadow (by Drop Shadow from Effect>Stylize) for it and I want to remove a part of this shadow. How do I do this? Eraser does not do it.

Thanx.

[Doug A Roberts]

There is no way of actually removing it; you would need to either draw a shape and use it as a clipping mask (Object > Clipping Mask > Make), or create a separate object that excludes the part you don't want shadowed, place it under the image, and apply the shadow to that instead.

[Mohsen5EA5]

I tried to do it by creating a shape and using Clipping Mask, but there is a problem: The original image and its shadow are at the same layer and I can not separate them at all. The boundaries of original image and its shadow are not exactlty the same and when I use clipping mask, Original image boundary, Shadow boundary and the Shape boundary clips each other and part of unwanted shadow is removed, since boundaries I can not select only the shadow.

There is no way to select only Shape boundary & Shadow boundary. When I select on the shadow, the original image is selected.

See the file attached:

[Mohsen5EA5]

If I can seperate Shadow and the original image, then I can do it by creating a shape and using clipping mask. Is it possible to separate a shadow and original image?

[Conrad_C]

The Drop Shadow effect is always tied to the object you applied it to. It is possible to separate them by choosing Object > Expand Appearance, and then mask out the separate image created from the drop shadow. But I think expanding the shadow rasterizes it, so that it is no longer resolution-independent. But if it works for you, expanding the appearance is one way.

Another method is to is duplicate the original and blur it, so that you create a shadow version of the original, then stack them. The picture below shows a rectangle with the Drop Shadow effect, on the left. On the right, the top object is the same rectangle with no effect, and the bottom object is a duplicate of the rectangle with the Gaussian Blur filter applied at 14px. Arrange those two as needed, and now you have an object with a separate shadow version of it (which would work better if the Fill was changed to Black). Now mask out whatever you want of just the shadow object.

[Mohsen5EA5]

What is your idea Doug?

[Monika Gause]

To separate the object and the shadow: Object > Expand appearance.

The shadow options are no longer editable then of course.