From Illustrator to Photoshop and Back Again!

By David Peters

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.

While Photoshop is very versatile in its ability to read multiple file formats, Illustrator is more limited in the formats it understands. However, once a file is in a readable format such as TIFF, GIF, JPEG etc, you can use the above mentioned File > Place command and select the image. Illustrator will "place" the desired image inside of the Illustrator file, and you will have some ability to modify the file within Illustrator.

The second way to convert a Photoshop file into Illustrator (or vice versa) is the Clipboard method. 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. The Copy-Paste method does come with certain limitations. It does not work as well for files of large size and you can easily overload the receiving program by pasting a large file into it.

The third method for introducing a file from one program into the other is dragging and dropping. If you want to take Photoshop art and put it in your Illustrator file, both programs must be open. Select 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.

You can also place paths from Photoshop into Illustrator files. Using the Path Selection tool in Photoshop, choose and copy the paths you want to move and paste them into Illustrator.

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