Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Exporting a Layered Photoshop Image

Illustrator can be exported to a variety of fi le formats, way beyond

the Web-cooperative JPEG, GIF, and PNG I showed you in the

last exercise. The Export command gives you a variety of options

including AutoCAD and Flash. But one of the more interesting op-

tions is Photoshop.

Exporting to Photoshop gives you the expected raster conversion,

but with a few useful nuances. First, you can export with your lay-

ers intact, allowing better editing control of the rasterized image.

Second, the type in your fi le can remain editable. And fi nally, Photo-

shop even manages to preserve useful vectors (in the form of vector

masks) in your images. There are several ways to bring Illustrator

content into Photoshop, with varying degrees of ease, speed, and

convenience (as I’ll show you in the sidebar, “Other Ways to Ren-

der Illustrations in Photoshop” on page 461), the particular method

I’ll show you in this exercise is a way to retain some of the useful

features of your existing Illustrator fi le.

1.

Open a fi le. If you’ve just completed the last exercise,

then you should still have the original Illustrator fi le,

Astormann.ai, open (because Save for Web doesn’t

close the original fi le when you’re fi nished with the dialog box.)

If not, reopen it; you’ll fi nd it in the Lesson 12 folder of Lesson

Files-AIcs5 1on1.

2. Expand the layers panel. Twirl open the single layer, called

Drawing, to note the fi ve object components that make up this

document. There’s a complex shape layer, a com-

pound path, two text layers, and another shape that

serves as the primary backdrop for the artwork.

3. Export the fi le. Choose File→Export to open the

Export dialog box. In the Save As fi eld, keep the

default name, Astormann.psd, or change it to some-

thing that makes sense to you. Navigate to wherever

you’d like to save your work.

4. Choose the Photoshop format. From the Format

pop-up menu, choose Photoshop (psd), as shown

in Figure 12-20. Click the Export button.

You can see the wide variety of fi le types to choose from when

you export a fi le from Illustrator.

Figure 12-20 .

P E A R L O F W I S D O M

You’ll need to have Photoshop installed to see the

ultimate results of this exercise. You might be able

to view the fi le in another image editor, but only

Photoshop will show you the accurate outcome of

the Photoshop layers.

459

Exporting a Layered Photoshop Image