Saving from PS to Output from AI

[dburgessjr]

I had a customer of mine send over a jpg file, standard white image on a black background.  I was able to pull the image away from the background to get it on a separate layer.  Now I would like to export the file from PS to AI so I can output and have control over my half tones and such.  I vaguely remember I needed to save the file as a DCS file but I'm not sure of the settings I need.  I've tried a few different options but every time I open the EPS file in AI its just a placed image.

Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks!

[blue moon]

you have to use the"place" option in Illustrator. top left corner file menu, it is about half way down.

pierre

[dburgessjr]

yeah I've been able to place the image in AI but I was wondering what the PS settings were suppose to be.  Should I be saving as ASCII, ASCII85 or Binary?  Is there an option in PS to save it with a transparent background?  Because when I place the EPS in AI its to want to come over with a white background.

[ebscreen]

Save it as a PSD with spot channels. Open a new Illy document (only works in CS2 and below)
and place the image. Embed. Your spot channels (and composite) will now be selectable.

They did away with this "bug" in CS3. If you go to the Adobe forums you can see screen printers
raising hell.

[Denis Kolar]

If you are placing a halftone image (bitmap) into the Illustrator, the file will have white background.
What you can do is, place the file in Illustrator and set Transparency to Multiply (Open Window menu and click on Transparency to get the pallet open it it is not already)
From PS, save the file as TIFF.

[dburgessjr]

If I save the image as a TIFF and place it in AI, will I be able to adjust the dot frequency, size and pattern?

[Denis Kolar]

Yest, but that will be before you export from PS and place in AI.

[Sbrem]

Save it as a PSD with spot channels. Open a new Illy document (only works in CS2 and below)
and place the image. Embed. Your spot channels (and composite) will now be selectable.

They did away with this "bug" in CS3. If you go to the Adobe forums you can see screen printers
raising hell.

They may have been re-infested, because I placed a PS w/spot channels into AI CS4 just last week... (I don't embed, I'll have to check that out to see what's different, thanks)

[ebscreen]

Were you able to select the spot channels individually?

[ZooCity]

Spot color channel seps as dcs come up fine in CS4.  Mine save out of PS CS4 as .eps.  File>Place (need to link it) and there you go.

The various save settings are a mystery to me for the most part. 

dbjr.-

first off, is this a single color sep your trying to get into illy?  If so, forget about the dcs and just place a .tiff in there.

If it's multi-color, run your usual sep routine but be sure to save each channel as a spot color as you seperate.  Google this if you aren't familiar, there's a few good, brief tutorials out there.  Place the file into illustrator and what you'll see is your spot colors appear in the swatches panel.  The image from the .dcs file itself will look like crap and behave like a placed raster image more or less.  Don't worry about that.  In my opinion, the point of placing this file type in Illustrator is either to add some vector work around or over top of it or because your keeping the workflow clean and outputting everything from Illy.  But in any case, you're all done with the raster seps by the time you get to this point. 
   
When you go to print is where you can adjust dot shape, frequency and angle- either in the print dialogue out of Illy or in your rip settings.  This goes down in the print box under "output", just switch over to "host-based" separations, turn off the composite cmyk colors and turn on your spots.  You can click on the other variables and adjust as needed.  If you can't get to any of the above stuff yer not sending the files to a postscript printer or rip. 

 

[Denis Kolar]

It is a little unclear what do you want to do. Could you upload the file you were talking about (JPG). If you got the white on black image, there is no need to mess with it and try to "pull" the image. All you need to do is "reverse" the image and you will get the black-on-white image needed to print seps.

[dburgessjr]

Perhaps I was trying a bit to hard on something that is seemingly easy.
Attached is the image I was talking about.

I have very little working experience with Photoshop in terms of designing artwork.  If at all possibilities I try and use AI; that's the program I'm most familiar with.  The reason I felt I needed to pull the 'skull' image from the black background is that the artwork is not to size.  The image given to me was about 7" wide and I needed to get it to 12".  By separating the design and getting it on its own layer I was able to scale the image only.

I can output directly to the RIP printer from PS but the halftones were ridiculously small.  I thought by sending the design to AI, I could adjust the frequency, size and pattern.  I wasn't aware that FilmMaker has the ability to override the PS program settings; i just figured out how to do that now.


I've tried the suggestions you guys offered in terms of creating spot colors in PS for this design but when I tried to PLACE the PSD file in AI, the program informed me that it did not support that color option.

I'd like to try to figure this out a little better as I would like to start doing some simulated process work.  Right now about 99.9% of our artwork is vector and its starting to get old.  If you guys know off hand good videos that will walk me through the process of converting the CMYK colors to SPOT in PS, then seperating and outputing the artwork from PS, that would be awesome.

Thanks again for your help guys!

[jsheridan]

Why not just place it in AI and then live trace it. I've been doing this with crappy JPG files and anything else I want to vectorize with a few clicks of some setting buttons.

[Denis Kolar]

Reversed

[Artelf2xs]

I've never had an issue with Placing a Link rather then an imbed?  There are certain Photoshop file formates that are not supported as placing in Illy.. Mostly I get this message if the spot channels names conflict with the Illy swatches.

After I discovered that Photoshop SC 3 or newer will allow you to output and change spot channels from Illy I have quite using DCS altogether..... the preview is just so much better.

You can output from Photoshop but it has to be in the Multi channel mode rather then, rgb,cmyk or greyscale.. then the separations tab will ungray and you can set LPI and angle....
You can use transfer functions to transfer that info to Illustrator, and you can over right that in the illustrator print window...

On this project I would just invert the gray scale file and place it... so much smaller the file with only one channel... Actually I would re create it vector myself..

Just remember Since PS7 if you create spot channels and do not SAVE AS... But just Save, it will delete them :-P
PS 4 & 5 are a little better at letting you know this!