Embedding non-TIFF, EPS Rasters, Passed to Quark

[PeterWilson]

I don't know Quark, but I often make ads in Illy or Photoshop that need to get placed in Quark.
I'm trying to understand what happens when you have images embedded in other images, and then passed on to Quark; to whit:

I recently layed out an ad in Illy 10, in which I needed to embed a photo out of Photoshop. I wanted the photo (a group portrait) to have a non-rectangular cutout, so that an Illustrator background would show through the gaps between the people. But I wanted the cutout to be soft and feathered, so a hard-edged clipping path was no good.

Now, when you output a TIFF from Photoshop, you can enable Transparency, and/or you can enable alpha channels to be saved. But when you place it in Illustrator neither of those seem to be recognized -- all you get is an opaque rectangular photo.
The only way I could figure out to get a soft (feathered) cutout photo into Illy was to Place a .psd (Photoshop format). That worked great, and no worries about previews. (Maybe a .png would've worked too -- I didn't try.)

But my question: What happens when you place an Illustrator EPS containing an embedded photo which is neither a tiff nor an EPS, into Quark? Will Quark be able to read an unusual file format embedded inside an EPS (in this case, .psd)?

Or am I misunderstanding: Once a raster file is embedded into Illy, does its source file format cease to be relevent? Like, pixels is pixels?

Thanks in advance!

 

[RyanPace]

I may be wrong on this one and someone may correct me, but I believe as long as the raster images are embedded into Illustrator and not "linked". Quark will only need to have the Illustrator eps.

Since the photoshop file is embedded and saved as an eps, quark should look at it as one file.

I have seen this before while doing prepress work and not encountered problems.

thoughts anyone?

 

[PeterWilson]

Ryan,

I sure appreciate your input. Yeah, it would make sense that the embedded file is encoded in the Illy EPS merely as the pixels; cuz why would Illy need to also embed the details of how the raster was originally encoded as a stand-alone file?

Hope this is the correct thinking! Thanks.