Hi everyone. Hey, we are going to look at expanding appearance In this  video we're gonna look at why we do it. Basically it's breaking up um, some  of the things we did in the last video  where we separate all the strokes out  so we can adjust them separately. That's what I've done down here. Okay. And we'll discuss the difference  between expand and expand appearance.

Okay? The shortcut is they both do the same thing,  but let's get into it and learn it properly. Okay? The reason you would use the expand appearance is at  the moment, this shape here  that we drew in the last video is a circle  with a bunch of strokes on it. If I go to my outline mode, okay,  which is command Y on a mac, control Y on a pc,  you can see it's just a single circle with a bunch of kind  of like effects applied to it. These effects are here in the appearance panel, okay?

And if I want to separate this,  like say red circle from the rest of them, I can't,  they're all kind of like smooshed together  and attached to this inner fill. So we're gonna select on it, I'm gonna go up to object  and you're gonna have one of these two available to you. Just pick whichever one is available. Okay? Expand appearance is this one. We're gonna do expand appearance  'cause it's the only one we can do  and it's just gonna separate uh, the fill.

Actually it's grouped, so I'm gonna click on it. Go to ungroup or ungroup over here in your quick actions. Now gonna click off here and you'll see  that my fill now is separate from  the all the different rings. Okay? So there are lots  of times where you need to expand it. You kinda get it to where you want  and you're like, actually I'm gonna grab my direct selection  tool now and I want this to have a blob.

Now the reason there are two is that there shouldn't be two. They should just mix 'em together in terms  of the expand appearance and expand just confuses everybody. But for you just click on whichever one's available. 'cause what happens is I'm gonna  undo get this back together. So this circle here is a fill with a stroke. So there's a couple of things going on in the appearance  panel and it will say expand appearance.

And if I get rid of the stroker on the outside. So if I do it, let's say we do it in the appearance panel,  we say click on stroke. I've kind of clicked on it in the kind  of like no man's land area. So it goes blue. Okay? So I clicked in this dark gray area  and I'm gonna say let's go trash.

Okay? So it's got no stroke. Now if I go to the object,  can you see it says it is an expand. Okay because it's kind of really simple. Now, I dunno why simple shapes  that haven't had anything applied to the parents' panel. Say expand if you add anything, it says expand appearance.

They should smush 'em together. I'm sure there's a technical reason why it's  useful to have them separate. I've never bumped into it. If you have let me know in the comments, it'd be great  to know if there's like a scientific reason  or there's a kind of a gotcha that might catch somebody out. The weird thing as well is if I undo that  and go back, if I select it here  and say you've got like a no stroke, okay,  so I've got it selected, basically end up at the same part,  but you can see it says expand appearance. Okay, so the appearance is still holding on something.

So I'm gonna delete it from the appearance panel  and now it says expand. It's a bit weird, don't worry. Click on whatever one's highlighted. Alright? Uh, the reason we expand appearance is  that we wanna break apart this quite  complex shape that we've made. We want to mess around with it.

Let's say we need to adjust the uh, red stroke around the  outside, but we can't 'cause it's  all attached to this inner fill. If I go to command Y on a Mac, control Y on a pc, you'll see  that it's just a simple shape with some effects applied  to the outside, all those different strokes. So if we wanna mess with 'em, we've gonna select on it  and we're gonna go up to object  and we're gonna go to whichever one is available. Basically it doesn't matter. Correct me in the comments. If there is a really good use case for like basically one  of them are agree grayed out and one of them won't be.

So you can only click one at a time. So in my opinion they should just smush them together. But let's explain the difference. Um, expand appearance means that there is a simple shape  with a whole bunch of stuff in the appearance  panel that is applied to it. When there is not expand will be available. They both do the same thing.

What they do is when I click on them, okay,  now if I click off, uh, gotta ungroup it,  click on the little ungroup sign, okay? And over here in the properties panel,  there'll be an ungroup there  as well, whichever one you want. And if I click off now and click on these parts,  can you see they're all individual parts? I can grab the white arrow, start messing around with them. That's what expand does. Okay?

And it doesn't really matter whether you use expand  appearance or expand whichever is available. Which is if I grab the ellipse tool and I have a fill  and no stroke and I hold shift down, okay, I get a circle. If I go up to here now object. I get expand. Okay? If I had a stroke to it, okay, add a stroke to it.

What color is it? Let's pick anything. Okay? I'll still get object, expand  'cause it's still kind of like the basics. It's just to fill in a stroke and opacity. Those are the only things we've done to it.

Nothing fancy. But if I had something fancy like another stroke, okay,  and I, let's change the color of it so you can see it. I gonna move to the bottom so we can see it. If I go up to object now, can you see it? Switch to expand appearance means there's things going on,  there's effects applied to it. If it's expand, it's just simple stuff.

Expand has a tiny bit more. Watch this. If I go to a circle and I drag it out  and I go to object expand, I get given this extra options. Do you wanna expand the fill and the stroke  or just the fill or just the stroke? I always leave them on. You might find a time where you might need  to expand just the fill.

Maybe there's a pattern in there  but you wanna leave the stroke on it. Okay? You might have a stroke where you want  to not touch the fill, okay? 'cause maybe it's got a gradient or something. You don't want to expand that. So there is a little bit of benefit for the expand, okay?

But it's just working with simple shapes. So you do end up expanding things  'cause you want to like you like, like this. But this weird little peek here. You wanna move this one around. I'm gonna have to select on it. Go  to object, expand appearance.

Now it's all individual parts. I can grab my direct ion tool  and say, actually I want you didn't quite get it. I want you and you  and I want to bring that kind of over here. Not that one to go over here. Okay? You end up doing some adjustments, okay?

Depending on what you, you know, you got close  to it using some of the effects in the appearance panel. But there might be just something a bit weird  that you want to fix up. There you go. Expand appearance, explodes out. Everything in the appearance panel expand does a very  similar job but it's only with simple shapes  that haven't been modified with the appearance panel. They both do the same job.

Let me know in the comments if you're like, no,  No, no, there's this other really good reason. Okay. And for you watching, go check out the comments,  see if there is somebody in here who's got a better  understanding of the difference. I'd be interested, use this for decades now. And uh, use the same one  of them's grayed out, use the other one. They both do a really similar job.

Alright, that is it. Expanding appearance in Illustrator. I'll see you in the next video.