Vector Studio 2.0 : Zoom Lens

The Zoom Lens plug-in allows you to create effects similar to what you see with a magnifying glass. A common application of a lens is to create a callout in which a portion of a drawing can be seen in greater detail superimposed upon, or off to the side of, the drawing. Zoom Lens also allows you to apply special effects to what is visible behind a lens through Illustrator's Live Effects feature. Zoom lenses are live on Illustrator's artboard: as you move or edit the objects lying underneath the lens, the lens is updated to reflect the change.

In this animation, you can see how a zoom lens magnifies a portion of the map illustration. You can see that the zoom lens contains source and destination objects: the source object defines the region of interest that will show up in the lens, and destination object defines where the region of interest shows up on the page. In this example, the source object lies over part of a map and a zoomed up version of that area shows up in the destination object.

Instead of dragging the source and destination objects to specify the magnification and offset, you can give precise measurements through the dialog controls. With the dialog, you can define relative angle, length, and zoom level. Included in the dialog is the Fill option and Use All Layers option. If the Fill option is on, the background of the lens will be the destination shape's current fill color. With the Use All Layers option, you can restrict the objects to be zoomed to the current layer or all layers.

Circles aren't the only options for zoom lens. You can choose any paths or compounds as your Zoom Lens objects. For example, you can use an oval, square, star, or any paths you can think of.

In addition to magnification, a Zoom Lens can also incorporate an Illustrator live effect. If you apply a style (or effects) to the destination object, the resulting objects will have that style applied to it. With this technique, you can effectively apply styles to portions of a page as opposed to entire objects. In the following animation, the zoom level is set to 100%, and the destination object lies directly on top of the source object.

[ Main ] [ Palette Shepherd ] [ Direction Handler ] [ Zoom Lens ] [ Sampler Tools ]
[ Retouch Brushes ] [ Wrinkle Remover ] [ Gradient Factory ] [ Gradient Texture ]

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