Video #12 - Exporting Artwork from Illustrator to Photoshop

export from adobe illustrator to photoshop psd line work coloring

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I know a lot of you are eager to get to all of the fun color stuff, but there's a few important details that we have to cover in order to make the coloring process work smoothly.

It's time to get our finished inked drawing out of Adobe Illustrator, and into Adobe Photoshop. All of the line work is going to get colored in Photoshop, and everything else will be painted in ArtRage.

export from adobe illustrator to photoshop psd format

Exporting artwork from Adobe Illustrator to Photoshop is pretty quick and easy, but there are a few choices you need to make to ensure a smooth transition.

Adobe Illustrator images are infinitely scalable -- in other words, they look perfectly smooth no matter how big you blow them up.

When you convert those drawings into Photoshop, you need to decide what the resolution will be, because Photoshop is a raster-based program; it sees drawings as a collection of individual pixels (pixel = "picture element") rather than mathematical vectors.

choose resolution 300 ppi export to illustrator to photoshop psd

If the resolution is too low, the drawing will look bad when it gets blown up. If the resolution is too high, the file size will become too big to work with. I find that 300 ppi (pixels per inch) is a happy medium.

preserve layers export to illustrator to photoshop psd

If you want to keep your layers separated, make sure to export to the Photoshop format. There's also a checkbox that appears during the conversion process which will ask you if you want to preserve the layers.

export from adobe illustrator to photoshop antialias off psd

Finally, one of the most important options is whether or not to use antialiasing. When a smooth vector drawing gets converted to a bitmap/raster-based program like Photoshop, you may want to have the edges smoothed out to give your line work a softer edge. Antialiasing is not a good choice when coloring cartoon and comic book style line work.

Say "no" to anti-aliasing.

Just say no.