processor hog

[egypturnash]

I'm rendering some AI stuff to bitmaps for some printing. Mostly by just dragging the .AI file into Photoshop's icon on the dock, because I want to resize them to fill a full page, and Photoshop lets you rasterize to fit an arbitrary width and height, while AI only does it by DPI, so you have to guess, or output high-res and scale down.

And while rendering 'Numbers Station', it's just taken forever. All those line blends. Photoshop was a9 95% processor usage for what felt like forever, with the progress bar barely moving. And...

...oh, I'm such a moron.

Photoshop's EPS render doesn't seem to understand opacity masks. I discovered that when 'Myself Am Hell' looked weird. And 'Numbers Station' is an opacity mask orgy. Duh! Glad I realized that before I'd let it grind for a half hour. Now I have AI writing out a 500dpi TIFF to scale down in PS, and it finished it before I was even done with this entry to post it. Duh!

Maybe I should try and send a polite feature request to Adobe for a little more flexibility in AI's bitmap exports... it'd be nice to say 'just make it 10 inches high, whatever scale factor that involves'. It seems weird that I can do this more simply with PS than AI.

Comments

[slinky-treecat.livejournal.com]

What may work faster is taking a screen capture of the piece in an open Illustrator window and then creating a new file in Photoshop and pasting the screencap and resizing that. Assuming that your viewable screen area is smaller than the size you need the final image anyway... <:)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I run my screen high-res, but it doesn't run at printer resolutions.

Yet.

Also there are a few glitches in AI's screen rendering. Mostly involving running with anti-aliasing on.

After doing seven or eight images, I've come to the conclusion that rendering out a 500dpi (or larger, in the case of smallish images) TIFF from AI, then resizing this in PS to the target size, is the least error-prone method. Because the only program that can reliably render some of AI's most complex features properly is, well, AI.

[slinky-treecat.livejournal.com]

I guess you're using features of AI that I've not touched on yet.. my screencapping from it hasn't caused any noticable changes in the appearance of my work. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

1. Make sure that "anti-aliased artwork" is turned on in the prefs. It's in the 'general' panel.
   
2. Make sure you have no stroke chosen - just fills.
   
3. Draw a black circle.
   
4. Draw another black circle that overlaps it about halfway.
   
5. Draw a white circle that overlaps both of the previous ellipses.
   
6. Select the second and third circles. Object->clipping mask->make (apple-7).
   
7. Select the now-invisible third circle. AI "helpfully" sets its stroke and fill to nothing for you when you make a clipping path. Set it back to white.

See that lovely little white line between the visible portion of the masked-off black circle and the unmasked one beneath? That's a rendering bug! I've learnt to ignore this, as the render-to-file code is smart enough to avoid this. Most of the images I output are done via Save For Web. Which respects crop-marks, if you've made any.

Just a random thought...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...since you've shown that AI can be given arbitrary pixel-counts to render too (at least in one dimension), just tell it the pixel-count of the page at the DPI you plan to print at?

8.5x11=6120x7920@720dpi,5100x6600@600dpi

If there's margins, it should still be pretty trivial to do the three or four multiplies and two subtracts to calculate the pixel-size you need, to avoid the 'resize in PS' step, which, while having a lot of technology behind it to make it look 'good' still isn't able to keep up with natively rendering it to the right size that I know of.

Re: Just a random thought...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I... cooould... but it's more math than I'm willing to deal with. Easier to render out at about twice up and scale down to fit.

Because to get the logic right, I'd have to... let's see. Try to turn the crop rectangle back to a normal path, curse and unlock a layer for the path to be put onto, try again to turn the cropmarks into a normal path, check its size, turn it back into cropmarks, do the math, render, then probably discover that I got it wrong and try it all over again.

I refuse to do all this gruntwork when I can get a quite acceptable result by just rendering higher, anti-aliased, and shrinking, anti-aliased. 300dpi is fine enough that you won't see it.

Ah, very true.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Somehow I thought it was just something along the lines of 'pick export from menu, click on "width" or "height" box, enter number, click export' and not some convoluted series of operations just to export an image. Had it been so, would have just been 2 numbers unlikely to change during a whole batch of exports that you had to remember to type in. As it is... good grief. That's more convoluted than the level-solutions for some puzzle games I know. =O.o=

Re: Just a random thought...

[ovon.livejournal.com]

I'd recommend against anti-aliasing for print, actually... It enhances the apparent resolution of images in a low-resolution medium like a computer screen, but the way it interpolates across adjoining pixels tends to make the edges of objects turn out a little soft on paper. Might be hard to see the difference unless you're using a really good printer and paper, though.

(I've always wondered if some old granny doing needlepoint by the fireside came up with the same technique, long before computer graphics came along...)

Re: Just a random thought...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

There is that.

My art's hyper-crisp; I don't think the printers and paper I currently have access to are exactly great, either! (want to get some portfolioish stuff out.)

Re: Just a random thought...

[nerfcoyote.livejournal.com]

Suddenly I'm reminded of a friend a dozen years ago who wanted to write a post-script driver for a weaving LOOM.