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Illustrator 10 problem pasting in selections or importing: not retaining alphas.
I could really use your help, the wife’s learning Adobe Illustrator 10 on her mac, is building a multi-layered document, and has been going crazy with this little problem. It would make a nice birthday present for her if I could show her how to solve it.
Problem: she has a scanned image open into Lemkesoft graphic converter, or Arcsoft Photostudio, and she wants to cut the background away, creating a file with an alpha channel where the background “was”. This is easily done with the magic wand tool, just like in photoshop, and the background alpha checkerboard layer is revealed. So far, so good. Up to that point, we know what we’re doing.
She then wants to import said irregularly-shaped selection graphic into an existing composition in her Adobe Illustrator 10 as it’s own layer, with others showing underneath it, but every time she tries to do this, by selecting, cutting (or copying) and then pasting said selection into Illustrator 10, the image winds up inside a box shape, with white filling the background around it, like alpha wasn’t saved out, or something.
We were trying it tonight with 32-bit targas and tiff files. Also started playing with saving as EPS, but still we get it coming into Illustrator with a full square, opaque frame around the image, not the irregular cutout shape or box with working alpha around the irregular object that we want. If I was doing this ebtirely in Photoshop, It would be a no-brainer: create new layer, drop it in. But this Illustrator thing has us stumped.
I’m guessing there’s a preference or filter we need to set in Illustrator to make things happen the way we want. Or a preferred format Illustrator wants for placing or pasting irregular image selections from one progam into the Illustrator canvas. If so, we need a step-by-step walk-through on what settings are needed.
It’s her birthday in the morning: if you can solve this, I will again be her hero. Thanks for any help you can offer.
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1 Reply
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You could try pasting your illustrator art into photoshop.
Or, you could make a path around your object in photoshop using the pen tool. Convert your working path to a clipping path in the path palette drop down menu, and save as an eps file.
Then “place” that file into you illustrator doc. File/place.
Maybe…
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