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Editing shapes
If you apply a Live Effect to a shape or text, the object remains fully editable. Each time you edit it in any
way, the Live Effect is automatically re-applied to the object. For locked effects this is not possible, and
you must remove the effect using the Delete
button on the Live Effect InfoBar, edit the shape, and then re-apply the effect.
Locking effects
When you resize or rotate an object which has a Live Effect applied, Web Designer Premium takes this
to be an edit and re-generates the effect. This may not be what you want, so it's useful sometimes to be
able to lock an effect.
Old-style Photoshop plug-ins are Locked
as soon as you apply them. This means the underlying shape can't be edited. You can also lock a Live
Effect and then when you resize or rotate the object the effect remains fixed, as if you were
resizing/rotating a bitmap.
As an example of this, imagine a plug-in that always applies horizontal ripples (the "Television" Live Effect
shown does something similar). Apply this effect to a shape, and you'd then see horizontal lines across it.
If you then rotated the shape, would you want the ripples to rotate with it? If so, lock the effect before
the rotation. Or would you want the horizontal ripple effect to be re-applied to your now rotated
rectangle? If so, leave the effect unlocked.
When a Live Effects is locked the effect rotates with the object (left).
When giving designs to other people to load, if they do not have the plug-ins that are used in the design,
then they won't see the effects applied. To get around this problem, you can lock the effects. Locked
effects are saved as bitmaps in the document so anyone can see them, even if they don't have the plug-ins
that generated the effects.
To lock an effect, select the object or objects and in the Live Effects
InfoBar click the Padlock icon. To unlock an effect that has been
locked this way, just click the Padlock
icon again.
You can still alter the resolution of the effect. For printing, you may want to use a higher resolution than if
the work is just for screen use.
Live Effect resolution
For screen and web use it's best to leave the resolution at the default 96 DPI; the same as the screen
resolution. If you require a higher resolution image, for example if you're printing or wanting to export a
high-resolution bitmap, then you can increase this to 150 DPI or even higher. The higher the resolution,
the longer it takes to generate or re-generate the effect (because it has to work with a much larger
bitmap) and the more memory is required.
You can set the resolution of a Live Effect to "Automatic", instead of choosing a fixed DPI value. With
this setting, the effect will be automatically re-generated when required, at the most appropriate
resolution. For example, if you print a design containing Live Effects, any effects set to Automatic
will be re-generated at print resolution if they are not already at that resolution or higher. In a large
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