Can't place a background image in Illustrator

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
April 12, 2019
2 replies
1591 views

I'm trying to place a large image in the background of an Illustrator composition. The canvas is large, and the image file is 300dpi, but the file size is only 74 MB, and I'm simply trying to place it as a linked file - I should have tons of memory to spare. Nevertheless, I keep getting the message "Insufficicient Memory was Available to complete the operation". This makes no sense. Is Illustrator trying to re-rasterize the entire canvas in RAM? What's going on here?

Does anyone know a workaround? I can't make the composition any smaller. (it's a 91" x 114" trade show background). Cutting the resolution is possible, but shouldn't be necessary.

I have 16GB of RAM and a hefty graphics card. I'm using the latest build of Illustrator on Windows 7.

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Correct answer jane-e

Do you still have the original Illustrator artwork? Can you export to .psd or .tiff instead of jpeg to see if that works?

Monika Gause

Community Expert

A 74 MB JPEG?

That will be a huge file. And yes, Illustrator must uncompress it.

John Mensinger

Community Expert

Have you rebooted then re-attempted? Would you consider doing it in InDesign instead?

Also, you surely don't need 300ppi (and the printer won't want it). You should be in contact with the output provider, determining a typical viewing distance, and agreeing upon a lower resolution.

C

Christopher Liam IveyAuthor

Inspiring

As I said, cutting the resolution to 150 dpi is possible, but shouldn't be necessary.

The original art is actually vector art, but was created in RGB space with overlapping transparencies and blend modes. Illustrator's colot space conversion algorithm doesn't handle this well, since it first changes the color on a per-object basis, instead of per-pixel, then re-applies the blend modes - this results in unexpected color shifts.

I had no problem opening the original composition in Photoshop at 300 dpi, then converting the flattened art. Photoshop is more graceful with big files, and allows me to choose from multiple algorithms for converting the color space. Sadly, it seems that I can't bring the converted art back into Illustrator.

I'm going to see if the printer will accept a flattened bitmap instead of an Illustrator file. They don't handle InDesign files.

jane-e

Correct answer

Community Expert

Do you still have the original Illustrator artwork? Can you export to .psd or .tiff instead of jpeg to see if that works?

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