Shadows in Illustrator dark, muddy, not smooth gradients

Question

Hello all,

I have an issue that no amount of messing with color settings seems to be able to fix. Attached are two screenshots. On the candle graphic, the shading underneath the flames is smooth and evenly colored. This is on my clients end. On my end, when I open the file, and when I return it to her, the candle looks like the screenshot where the shading beneath the flames is a muddy black.

Please help...I've tried everything, reinstalling the program, rebuilding the entire document, everything....I don't know if this is just an issue of my MacBook not being able to handle these sorts of graphics or not.

Brad @ Roaring Mouse · Answer

When you got the file from your client, did you scale it down? I suspect you've scaled the artwork down at some point, and even with Scale Strokes and Effects turned on, it seems there's a practical limit to how well a feather can be rendered at an extremely small size. Whether this is a bug (I'm leaning in that direction) or a technical limitation I don't know. I know there was similar issue in the past with Gaussian Blurs not scaling properly, but that was fixed at some point, so this might be a related bug taht's still unsolved.

To demonstrate: if you scale your artwork up by 400% (with Scale Strokes and Effects turned on as you should), you will see how the feathered object changes appearance.

Recommendations: 1. Change the shadow to a gradation fill instead.

OR, 2. leave the artwork at it was at the original large size with the corrcet shadow, and instead of scaling it down as you have for your small sticker, PLACE the original file as a link instead and scale that. That seems to work better in a test I did now

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