Hello, I am having a lot of problems trying to get my jpeg to come out correct. I want an 8 x 12 piece of art. In the process of creating the image, i had to use a drop shadow. However, some of the drop shadow that I dont care about ended up going over the 8" x 12". No problem right? I simply copied the object with the shadow, put the copy on top of the object, highlighted both and made a clipping mask. The end result was perfect -- it clipped off the drop shadow that was extending over the nice white border and even off into space.
However, when I tried to export into a jpeg for print, the result had the correct size white border on the top, but the other sides were too big. Sometimes I miss a stray dot or random line that is far off of the artboard, and deleting the stray stuff corrects everything. But this time everything was fine. I realized that although the clipping mask cut off the drop shadow, illustrator still registered the drop shadow as being a part of the image and taking up space. So the jpeg doesnt show it, but the deminsions are all off.
My question is whether there is a way to manually cut off parts of a drop shadow without using the clipping mask like I did.
Thanks!