Saving In Illustrator - My JPEG and PNG pixelate

Question

Hi, hope there is someone that can help me. I have been using illustrator for more than 2 years now - so I have a bit of experience when it comes to working on it.

All of a sudden when saving a JPEG and PNG to my computer, when I open them up or want to print them they pixelate - which I know is not supposed to happen as Illustrator works with vectors so things designed within Illustrator does not use pixels to make up what is being designed. Does anyone have a solution or a reason to why this is happening?

Last week when I saved my documents as JPEG and PNGs it was fine and the quality was as it should be, but now there is no way for me to save it without it pixelating. When I save as a PDF then the artwork/logos are fine, they do not loose any quality - but this problem is that it is resulting in saving it as a PDF and then dragging it open in Photoshop to save it as a JPEG or PNG, which still pixelates but not as bad as it does in Illustrator. But the issue comes in when I print the stuff then it comes out blurry because the files quality is not as it should be.

If there are any solutions, please help. I have gone through all the questions and answers stating to tick the anti-aliased artwork - which was ticked before I even saw it, but still no changes.

Thank you in advance.

Mylenium · Accepted Answer

There are a bunch of bugs where AI messes up the DPI on export, but the rest simply sounds like you are not correctly setting the DPI in the document settings etc. correctly in the first place. Printing outside AI has nothing to do with any of that, so if your printer driver "pixxelates" them, you just don't have enough to work with. Whether that's an actual shortage of pixels and the printer driver enlarging the images or something else is impossible to determine. You have not provided any exact info about these things.

Mylenium

Imaginerie · Answer

First when you export your docs as JPEGs or PNG they aren't vectors anymore. So you need to check how Illustrator rasterise your files.
Particularly if you added effects, (and you can check your raster settings in the effects menu)

also as per the raster resolution when you set up the document first time
(It's asking for a resolution for a reason, it would be irrelevant if we didn't need it as a rasterised file at some point, same with the size)

Same if you got transparencies

Sometimes thse revert to default when you update for some reason.

That and obviously check your documents settings as per @Mylenium answer of course

PDFs are still a vector format, that's why they end up printed OK.

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