Crop Options or Approach in Illustrator 9? 2

[hohriver]

Okay....I know I'm speaking to an empty audience in here...but the Adobe User to User Forum is worthless...kind of like a 'Read Only' file....so what's a body to do, huh?

But the question of the hour is: how do you crop an illustration to reduce it's file size prior to opening it in another application ( I'm thinking Photoshop 6 here )?
The 'crop' function seems to work differently than anything I've ever been exposed to, and I'm seeing varying results and don't know what to expect.

My $100 CD-Rom from lynda.com, 'Learning Illustrator 9', fails to cover this topic.

Does anyone know how to reduce the size, then?
Anyone?

 

[azhdeem]

I might be able to help but I need a little more info. How big are the files? Is everything vector drawn in Illustrator or do you have any pictures in it?

I have not really worked that much with Illustrator 9 but I have had similar problems with Illustrator 8 and this is how I solved them.

I was given .ai files for a manual a coworker was working on. The files were 80+ megs. These were taking a lot of time to open in Photoshop, as you can imagine. She was using many pictures in her layout and the pictures were not compressed. Are you using many images (non-vector, imported .jpgs, etc..) in your file. If so, try reducing the individual file size of those images, making them the size that you are going to need, changing the file format, etc... Basically, do everything to shrink the images down prior to using them in Illustrator. If you have 3 or 4 bitmaps, targas, or jpegs in your file that are big in file size that might be causing it.

Let me know if this helps.

Jer
azhdeem@hotmail.com

 

[hohriver]

Thank you for your suggestions, but I didn't make myself clear enough. I did not mean overall 'file' size; I just
meant how do you easily crop around an image, shape, or path without having to import the entire page into PS 6? In a particular case, I was simply trying to 'grab' a pie chart that had a few layers superimposed on it and bring it into PS to emboss, since I cannot seem to find a method to emboss in AI? It was all vector, and fairly small K.

It's self-explanatory within PS; size crop tool around
desired element; crop; save or copy, and import.

It doesn't seem to work like that in AI 9. How DOES it work for a simple crop of a specific image or element on the page?

Thanks again for your assistance.

 

[azhdeem]

If all you want is to select something form your .ai file for adjustment in PS, here is one way to do it. I used AI8 and PS 5.5 to do this in, and therefore I lost the vector quality moving between the two programs. I have not tried this in the newer ones yet, so you might be able to improve on this suggestion and if so please let me know. Still, as long as you don't alter the size of the element it should be o.k.

The crop function in AI just does not do what we Photoshop users have grown accustomed to seeing. It takes your artwork, and divides it into its individual components and then creates a box around the intersecting pieces and then deletes all the parts of the artwork that fall outside the boundary. It also removes any strokes. However I have noticed that this doesn't seem to work with graphs.

What I did was select the pie graph (or whatever else you want to alter) and nothing else. Then I copied the graph into another temporary AI file and saved that alone. When I opened the file up in PS it was sized correctly (try anti-aliasing on and off when opening the file in PS--one way might work better for you)then I just embossed, saved it as a .jpg, the placed the image back into the .ai document.

I know this is a round about way, but it worked, and it looked pretty good, especially if the element wasn't that big on the page and there were other things there. I will try it on AI9 later to see if I can figure it out.

Let me know if this helps at all.
Jer
azhdeem@hotmail.com

 

[GeorgeMack]

If all you want to do is to copy an element into Photoshop, then why not either cut and paste (as image, or as paths) or drag'n' drop into Photoshop? that way the only thing you bring is the bounds of the object itself, not the "page object".

Also note: If you save an Illustrator file as an eps file, one of the properties that is included is a "bounding box", the square shape that includes all printable elements. Opening the eps in Photoshop will access the bounding box and suggest that as a file dimension.

Maybe one of these approaches would work.