mutiple DPI's in Illustrator

[tristankelley]

Hi all,
I have placed several linked PS images in an Illustrator project I am working on. Most of the images are 300 dpi however there is one that is 600 dpi. Do you guys think this will matter? Will the 600 DPI image still look good if the Illustrator EPS is opened/printed at 300 DPI or should I just go ahead and take it down to 300 DPI in PS before going to Illustrator? Thanks!

[DDD]

what is it going to be used for..Print? of like a pdf type of thing?

[tristankelley]

what is it going to be used for..Print? of like a pdf type of thing?

Yes, a 4C print job - the print broker my company uses usually likes an EPS or PDF.

[DDD]

I believe your embedd hi res file will inherit the overall dpi. But I could be wrong. I'll ask my print guru around here when he comes back, if someone has not answered already.

[simplistik]

LoL, yes... DDD is right... if you embed the actual file it will maintain it's original, resolution... HOWEVER it's not gonna be as scaleable as the Ill file is. It will only be scaleable to it's 100% origin, after that it will distort.

[.soulty]

yeah that seems right simplistik..
well sorta offtopic... i had this job where i received all the artwork, which was a psd file that had transparency, and i was to place that psd in the illustrator, put some illustrator type together and prepare it for print, the printer told me that the psd imported is fine to print with, but this seems strange to me, dosent just importing the .psd to illustrator basically show a kinda "ss" of what the actual file is.(although it retained its transparency).. i always wondered if this was ok to print with.

if you guys know about this, would appreciate it

[DDD]

if the dpi is all good I dont see why not. I'll have to test that one day tho

[simplistik]

yeah that seems right simplistik..
well sorta offtopic... i had this job where i received all the artwork, which was a psd file that had transparency, and i was to place that psd in the illustrator, put some illustrator type together and prepare it for print, the printer told me that the psd imported is fine to print with, but this seems strange to me, dosent just importing the .psd to illustrator basically show a kinda "ss" of what the actual file is.(although it retained its transparency).. i always wondered if this was ok to print with.

if you guys know about this, would appreciate it

Yes it's perfectly ok to print like that. When you import a file into AI, on screen it will show a preview of the "SS" of that file. However, when it goes to print the postscript tells it that it needs to read from the external source, when it does that it goes into the linked file, and reads that info... not the info that is previewed on screen. Now if you embed it... which I actually think PS files automatically do... it puts ALL that same info from the original file in the AI. Check it out... you should notice a substantial file size difference in an embeded image and the same image that is still linking.

It works in the same way that Quark, and Indesign work.

[.soulty]

ah kool, thanks guys. yeah i noticed the difference simplisitik. and i usually always link my source bitmap images. making a illustrator files larger than it really should be does some nasty things to the file and illustrator (like crashing illustrator, lol).

i appreciate the info. cheers. :beam:

[.soulty]

HOWEVER it's not gonna be as scaleable as the Ill file is. It will only be scaleable to it's 100% origin, after that it will distort.

Kinda continuing on my off the subject question i asked.... what simplistik said here i understood but i was wondering if you scaled a image to not a normal scalling size (50% ,25%, 75%) say 65% or 40% of the original image would that be ok for print?

My setup atm required several of the same image in different smaller scales, if this was not the cause i would just then otherwise re-import the source file scaled to what i need but as it is i need to know if its cool to have a large dimension image which i can scale down to various sizes and be press print friendly.


thanks

[.soulty]

bump...

[simplistik]

Kinda continuing on my off the subject question i asked.... what simplistik said here i understood but i was wondering if you scaled a image to not a normal scalling size (50% ,25%, 75%) say 65% or 40% of the original image would that be ok for print?

My setup atm required several of the same image in different smaller scales, if this was not the cause i would just then otherwise re-import the source file scaled to what i need but as it is i need to know if its cool to have a large dimension image which i can scale down to various sizes and be press print friendly.


thanks

Umm.... I hope this is what you're looking for. I think you're in PS so that's what I'll answer it for. Basically if you scale down at an odd number, sometimes certain elements will distort/pixelate. Type and angled shapes do it alot, images can loose some info as well. But aside from all of that if it looks good on screen, it will more than likely look good on print. On a rare occassion will you get something that doesn't look like your screen, of course this doesn't include colors, because well.... monitors don't always show the same color as the offset.

[.soulty]

lol, my bad i should of explained i was asking this in regards to illustrator, as you mentioned that sometimes you maye get distortion, so is it the same case for illustrator?

// ive never seem to have had the abilty to control imported images in illustrator very well in the past..

[simplistik]

Yea it will most likely be fine, we do that here at RBK... but it's pretty much the same as I said above, sometimes you'll get funky distortions but most of the time you'll be fine

[.soulty]

aight cool deal.. thanks for the info sim. ;)

[DDD]

Hey Soulty I just did a pretty big job for Gallo doing this and I was concerned, because I thought of this thread. But everything went well in my case. (Printed a pretty big binded style guide with a bunch leaflets)

[.soulty]

good to hear your project went well DDD. :thumb:

-it should be fine, i was just concerned because i have never trusted the scale information in the linked pallete in illustrator, it always looked wrong to me.. :crazy: