From Illustrator to Photoshop and Back Again! | Photography

By DavidPeters
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Illustrator and Photoshop are powerful programs by themselves, but most artists find that using a combination of the two programs enables them to produce beautiful artwork for publication. There are three basic ways to move Photoshop files into an Illustrator document.

Both programs respond to a File > Place command to either "place" Illustrator artwork into a Photoshop file or a Photoshop image into an Illustrator document. This is the most traditionally used method among users for moving a file from one program to the other. The caution in this method is that the artwork or image must be in a file format readable by the other program.

Photoshop is very adaptable at reading various file formats. Illustrator has a few more restrictions in the formats it recognizes, but once a Photoshop file is in an understandable format (i.e. TIFF, GIF, JPEG, etc.) using the File > Place command with the desired image is simple. Illustrator will "place" this image inside the Illustrator file and allow you some manipulation of the file in Illustrator.

The second way to introduce a Photoshop file into Illustrator (or vice versa) is the tried-and-true Clipboard. Simply copy the file elements you want from one program using the Copy command, and paste it into the other program using the Paste command. There are limitations to using the Copy-Paste method. It doesn't work so well for large files, and you can easily swamp the receiving program by pasting a large file into it.

The third method for converting a file from one program into the other is dragging and dropping. To perform this method, both programs must be open. Decide on the artwork you want to transfer, and simply drag it out of the Photoshop window onto the Illustrator window. To take Illustrator art into Photoshop, simply select the artwork from an open Illustrator window, drag it to an open Photoshop window and drop it into Photoshop.

One last tip is that you can place paths from Photoshop to Illustrator files by using the Path Selection tool in Photoshop. With this feature, simply pick the paths you want to move and paste them into Illustrator.

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