Just fooling around. I needed to not think about some things, so I pulled this full-page bit of randomness from the end of my recently-filled sketchbook and went into AI.
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Jul. 22nd, 2004
aha! some output hassles solved.
Jul. 22nd, 2004 06:49 pmI finally figured out how to easily get images from AI into an arbitrarily-sized bitmap for printing purposes. Trying to load the raw .AI file into Photoshop never cut it; Photoshop ignores opacity masks and some other high-end features. And saving a PDF to load into Photoshop had the same result - not surprising, since I believe an AI file is just a more verbose PDF. But exporting an EPS from Illustrator went perfectly.
Why not just contemplate printing from AI? Well, several reasons. The document's got an embedded size; scaling it up or down to fill a printable area's a royal pain. And then you get to wonder if the printer has enough memory to handle the complex paths. I haven't tried printing my more complex stuff direct from AI, and I never really use pattern-fills, which're supposedly murder on printers, but I hear it can be a nightmare. Load an EPS or PSD into Photoshop, and it pops up a dialogue box asking exactly how you want to rasterize it, including the ability to set whatever dimensions and DPI you like. I just rasterized that picture of Revar from a while back at 300dpi, and it looked nice. (It's currently my torture test for rasterizing, as it has a lot of obvious transparency, and a decent amount of the other effects I'm prone to use.)
AI rasterizes faster than Photoshop, but it's not as flexible in its output options; all it lets you manipulate is the DPI. Annoying. This may've been fixed in AI CS, but I still use 10.
Postscript level 2 and 3 both seem to work fine, with no appreciable difference in file size or processing time.
Why didn't I try AI->EPS->PS before? Duh.
Also, I found the variety of ways people read that last picture pretty amusing: domed city? city-busting bomb? quietly tranquil stroll? I'm surprised nobody read the figure as some sort of ghost, now that I look at it - the gradient's pretty spooky. For the record, I was thinking 'domed city', but it started looking 'nuclear blast' as it evolved, and I was careful to not make a decisive statement either way. I like ambiguity.
Why not just contemplate printing from AI? Well, several reasons. The document's got an embedded size; scaling it up or down to fill a printable area's a royal pain. And then you get to wonder if the printer has enough memory to handle the complex paths. I haven't tried printing my more complex stuff direct from AI, and I never really use pattern-fills, which're supposedly murder on printers, but I hear it can be a nightmare. Load an EPS or PSD into Photoshop, and it pops up a dialogue box asking exactly how you want to rasterize it, including the ability to set whatever dimensions and DPI you like. I just rasterized that picture of Revar from a while back at 300dpi, and it looked nice. (It's currently my torture test for rasterizing, as it has a lot of obvious transparency, and a decent amount of the other effects I'm prone to use.)
AI rasterizes faster than Photoshop, but it's not as flexible in its output options; all it lets you manipulate is the DPI. Annoying. This may've been fixed in AI CS, but I still use 10.
Postscript level 2 and 3 both seem to work fine, with no appreciable difference in file size or processing time.
Why didn't I try AI->EPS->PS before? Duh.
Also, I found the variety of ways people read that last picture pretty amusing: domed city? city-busting bomb? quietly tranquil stroll? I'm surprised nobody read the figure as some sort of ghost, now that I look at it - the gradient's pretty spooky. For the record, I was thinking 'domed city', but it started looking 'nuclear blast' as it evolved, and I was careful to not make a decisive statement either way. I like ambiguity.