Adobe® Illustrator® 10 Classroom in a Book®

Printing and saving files with transparency effects

Once you've created a document with transparency, blending modes, feathering, or other effects that produce artwork with transparency effects, you must set up the document for printing or exporting. The best way to preserve transparency effects is to export the document to the Photoshop (PSD) file format. Exporting to the Photoshop file format retains the transparency masks and links created in the Transparency palette and the layers as they were created in Illustrator. However, only top-level layers are preserved; any nested layers in Illustrator are flattened into the top-level layer.

Illustrator flattens artwork containing transparency before printing or saving the artwork. During flattening, ...