Adobe CS3 Print Workflow - How to Save Different File Types

In this lesson you are not really going to have to create anything, all the work has been created for you. What we are going to do is save a file three different times so you can see the advantages and disadvantages of certain file formats.

This is a specialized image that has both pixels and vector content with in a Photoshop file. So go to your Project Files folder, choose File>Open and in Chapter 01, the file is the Erpco_logo.psd. And the Erpco logo has some interesting parts to it. If you look at the Layers panel, you will see from the bottom of there is a layer that has some transparency in it, has some gradient that go from full color to transparent and they are masked off by something called the vector mask. Now if you have used layer masks and we used a layer mask when we silhouetted the dandelion. Layer mask is made from pixels but vector mask is made from vector so you draw a pen path and then you convert that to a mask for the layer, it's a same concept as a layer mask, it just that it has hard edge made from the vector, not a soft edge made from pixels.

The next layer up, layer 5 is just for adding the white highlights to the tear drop shapes. And then the third layer began life as text layer but that text was converted to outlines so that you would need the font. What we need to do with this file when we place it InDesign is keep that transparency, keep that effect in the little tear drop shapes where you go from full color to translucent and we want to keep the hard vector edge around the tear drop shapes and around the text.

But if you take a look at this in a magnified view in Photoshop, at first it looks like we really don't have vector edges. If you choose your Zoom tool out of the bottom of the Tool panel, you just click-and-drag a zoom marquee around some segment of the art, you will see that it looks very pixelated. So why am I touting you the advantages of vectors, this is one of the few instances where what you see in Photoshop is not as good as what you will get when you place this in InDesign. If you double click the Hand tool, it takes you back to a full page view and here is why we are headed, if we are going to place this in InDesign, we like to keep the translucency but we want the hard edges. We have three different choices for file format. We can save this is as PSD, just like it is or we can save it as an EPS, that's an old fashion format or we can save as a Photoshop PDF and here are the advantages and disadvantages.

If we save it as a native PSD, we can certainly open it back up in Photoshop if we need to change anything but when we place it in an InDesign file, you will see that we don't have nice crisp edges. So that's not good. We could save it as an EPS and we would have nice, sharp edges but we would loose the transparency in the little tear drop shapes and we would loose the ability round trip back in to Photoshop and edit this. If you attempt to open up an EPS in Photoshop, it's going to offer the re-rasterize it and then all the fonts been sort of squeezed out of it. So it turns out that the ideal file format for file like this that has transparency and has vector edges is Photoshop PDF and it's really the only time you are justified in saving a Photoshop PDF.