FILTERiT 5: Lens Tool

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Fish-eye Lens

Magnify Lens

Twirl Lens

Tone Lens

Fish-eye Lens with Trace option

The Lens Tool allows you to distort a part of a selected object or objects in one of four ways, depending upon which lens type is selected. Using the Trace option produces duplicate objects along the mouse's path.

With a selection active on the Artboard, click on the Lens Tool in the Toolbox. The cursor becomes a crosshair. In order to avoid interfering with the live preview of the effect, the active area for the lens Tool is not centered on the crosshair. Rather, the circular area that defines the virtual lens frame is to the upper-left of the cursor. Dragging the mouse shows the effect; releasing the mouse button applies the effect.

Note: To use the Lens Tool with text, the type must first be converted to outlines. Use the Illustrator menu command Type> Create Outlines.

The Lens Tool can distort all or part of a vector object. The anchor points of the object that fall within the lens frame will be distorted. Additional anchor points will be created as necessary.

The four types of lenses each have their own specific capabilities and options:

Fish-eye Lens
With a positive number in the Thickness setting, any object in the center of the lens area will appear to bulge outward. With a negative Thickness setting, the center is moved away.

Magnify Lens
The Magnify Lens scales objects within the lens area. The magnification settings can range from 100% to 4000%.

Twirl Lens
The effect of the Twirl Lens is governed by two settings. Angle determines the angle (direction) of the effect, while Cycle determines the amount of twirl, and therefore the complexity of the resulting object.

Tone Lens
The Tone Lens allows you to reduce the size of selected objects or groups. The height and width values can range from 0% to 100%. Choosing the Group as one unit option allows grouped objects to be scaled as a single object. It has no effect on ungrouped objects.

Tip: Tone lens is very effective with numerous small objects arranged in rows and columns.

Resizing the Lens Frame
Hold down the Alt key and drag to change the size of the lens frame. Once you let go of the Alt key, the size will be fixed. Remember that the Lens Tool is active while being resized, so it is best to make sure that there is no active selection on the Artboard while resizing. Holding down the Shift key will constrain the lens frame to a circle. The height and width of the Lens Tool's active area can also be entered numerically in the Lens Tool palette, or changed with the up and down arrows.

Trace
When checked, Trace allows the Lens Tool to duplicate the selected objects within the target area. When unchecked, the Lens Tool will only distort the selected objects. When Drag Along is selected, duplicate objects will be created at a specified distance, measured in pixels, spread uniformly along the Lens Tool's path. Uniform will space the specified number of duplicate objects evenly. Accelerate spaces the duplicate objects farther apart at the end of the drag, while Decelerate spaces them closer together at the end of the drag. The One Way option for Uniform, Accelerate, and Decelerate allows the Lens Tool to produce duplicate objects from the original objects to the point where the mouse button is released. When the Round Trip option is selected, another set of copies will extend from the point where the mouse button was released back to the original. This, in effect, produces two sets of copies: one from the original to the farthest point, and another from the farthest point back to the original.

Tip: The Lens Tool's Trace option, which produces duplicates of the selected objects, can be used in conjunction with Illustrator's transparency capability to produce motion blur effects.

After using the Trace option to duplicate objects along a path, Illustrator 9's Release to Layers command can prepare the image for animation. You can also achieve the same result by holding down the Command key while releasing the mouse button. Each object created by the Lens Tool will be placed on a separate layer.