Adding Effects to Illustrator Actions

Filters can be easily added to an Action whereas Effects can’t be added directly. But rejoice, for these are two work-arounds...

Actions are your friend in Adobe Illustrator. It truly is automation without the need to engage brain and can allow you to save hours on standard production tasks. The Phantasm CS color control Filters for Illustrator are actionable, which means that common workflow tasks such as white overprint removal can be automated.

Note: this tip does not describe the process of recording an action. For that, please refer to Adobe’s own documentation…

In order to rationalise Illustrator’s user interface, with CS4 the Illustrator development team removed the top-level Filter menu and converted all remaining standard Filters into live Effects. There is a rationale for this, but Filters continue to have their uses; they may not be “live”, but that’s not always desired anyway. Therefore Astute Graphics maintained all Filter variants of its color adjustment tools and they can be found in the Object > Filters > sub-menu with CS4 and above.

Filters and Effects behave slightly differently in Illustrator. Briefly, Filters act on the underlying objects, ignoring any Effects applied, whereas Effects are applied on top of any other Effects which may have already been applied. But the other main difference is that Filters can be easily added to an Action whereas Effects can’t be added directly. This is a very annoying shortfall, especially since Adobe’s removal of their own Filters.

But rejoice, for these are two work-arounds:

1 – Manually adding an Effect dialogue to an Action

• When recording an action, click on the Action panel’s drop-down menu and select Insert Menu Item…
  
• The window Insert Menu Item opens.
  
• This looks like a modal window (ie. you can’t open another menu or user another window until you’ve finished with this one), but it doesn’t act like it. While this window is open, select the Effect you want as normally from the Effects menu (although do not try to use the top two menu items which are the previously-applied Effects, as this will not work).

  

• That’s it! You can finish off your Action and stop recording and the Effect will appear in the Action. But it’s important to note that on playback, the Effect will not be applied automatically, nor be pre-deinfed with the settings applied when the Action was recorded. Instead, it will automatically open the Effect window at the correct point, prompting the user to apply the Effect.

  

 

2 – Using a Graphic Style to add an Effect in an Action

• Apply the desired Effect, or stack of Effects, to an object or some artwork and then create a Graphic Styles via the Graphic Styles panel.

  

• Start a new Action and simply apply the Graphic Style to an object. This will be recorded in the Action and will automatically apply all Effect attributes defined when the Action was recorded. Neither will the Effect dialogue window open.

  

• Important notes:
  1. The Graphic Style needs to be present in the document’s Graphic Styles panel before the Action is played back.
  2. Changing the name of the Graphic Style (double-click on the thumbnail in the Graphic Styles panel) will break the reference made to it in the Action.
  3. Graphic Styles can act differently on grouped objects or individual objects, so either try to create a style based on similar artwork the Actions will be applied to, or group/ungroup objects in an Action before applying a graphic style.