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 ...