I can't jpeg to edge of clipping mask anymore?

[simonw99602295]

I cannot see why this has happened to me now, though for years I have been able to create a jpeg on a file using a clipping mask without the hidden excess outside of the mask being included in the jpeg. Now for some reason I am having large white bleed areas around the image wanted, which then need to be cropped out in photoshop and resaved to then go back and open into illustrator to add cut paths.

With using this function every day at work for in our sign business, and having years worth of files I often reuse and jpeg, this is now a very time consuming issue for me to have to go back and forth between illustrator and photoshop everytime.  

I understand you can use the artboard to make as cropping edges, though all my hundreds of files are not set up to do this, even a lot of the time are not on the artboard. It worked before for years for me, so am I unsure what I have done, or what has changed for this to now be a problem. 

I appreciate any help on this please. 

[simonw99602295]

[kevin28559867r6n0]

Just got the 28.5 version and that problem came back.
Thought that was solved sinse I have been using it as you explained.
File>Export>Export As... and without using the "Use Artboards" option, it use to export just to the edge of the masked items.
Now we are back to the old days, when doing this... the inside objects on the mask wont show, but the white space dose....

[Kurt Gold]

There is a workaround to overcome this misbehaviour in Illustrator 28.5.

1. Select the clipping group and convert it to a static symbol in the Symbols palette.

2. File > Export > Export as ... (.jpg)

The exported .jpg file should now be cropped according to the clipping path boundaries.

[kevin28559867r6n0]

didnt work, I have linked images and static symbols wont work with it, wont be embeding all the images to make it work...
Dont understand why they fixed it and it came back 😞

[Kurt Gold]

Yes, the workaround does not work with linked images. This was an unknown factor you didn't mention.

One could create a simple action in the meantime, but probably this is not what you want to do.

It is disappointing that the misbehaviour has been reintroduced. Hopefully it will be corrected soon.

[simonw99602295]

Its very frustrating, thanks for trying to help out, meanwhile I am back to manually cropping every file in photoshop every day... Fingers crossed they revert it back again sometime soon. From now on I will be creating files with the artboards sized to the edges of each items to be jpegged, as that seems the best option moving forward for now.

[kevin28559867r6n0]

Found a faster way, resizing the artboard and when exporting, using the option use artboard and disable the option of suffix. (at least in a one export at a time). That will use the name you specify without having to deal with the suffix added for the artboard.
havent tested the multiple boards without the suffix (maybe will use the name of the artboard)

[Kurt Gold]

As far as I can see it is fixed in the latest beta version of Illustrator (28.7 17).

[Bobby Henderson · Accepted solution]

The clipping mask behavior you describe with exported JPEG images from Illustrator has been common for some time. The Export Selection command (in the right-click fly out menu) is an option; it brings up the Export for Screens dialog box. That will export JPEG images with the areas outside the clipping mask discarded.

I'm not sure I follow why you are exporting artwork from Illustrator in JPEG format only to bring the JPEG file back into Illustrator to add cut paths. Why not just keep the artwork in vector format, apply the cut paths and then export the file in PDF format?

[simonw99602295]

Thanks I will give this a go asap. Its only just started happening with me a few days a go, and I have auto updates on for my Creative Cloud. 

As for why I do this, is that our Roland Printers ripping program VersaWorks loses recognition of the cutting path when there is blurs, gradients from memory etc, so I have to jpeg the file and paste the cutting path ontop and resave. This is an issue in itself, but with adding haing to now crop and resave into this, it just means half my day now is not actually being productive...   

[Bobby Henderson]

Ah, VersaWorks. That explains it. Back in the mid or late 2000's when our sign shop first ventured into large format printing we bought a Roland VersaCAMM VP540 printer, which included VersaWorks. I keenly remember the application being very limited on what kinds of artwork would allow cut paths to be enabled and other kinds where cut paths wouldn't show up at all. That led to round-tripping a lot of artwork thru Photoshop, placing TIFF images into Illustrator, floating cut paths above them and then saving the results as EPS files to then load into VersaWorks. I hated it.

I guess Roland hasn't done anything to improve that situation?

Around 10 or so years ago we added a HP Latex360 printer with Onyx Thrive. That solved all the cut path availability problems that would come up in VersaWorks. The prints would come out of the HP printer, get laminted and then fed into a Graphtec vinyl cutter for the cut operation. Thrive and the 3 printers we have running off of it aren't without their headaches. This morning I had to deal with a stubborn Thrive crash issue; the application window would disappear within 20 seconds of launching RIP Queue. The culprit turned out to be a corrupt art file someone loaded into the queue from a failing USB memory stick.

[simonw99602295]

Just ran through what you said to try and it worked, though not to how I used to have it. Now it saves to a seperate folder it makes up and I cant seem to change the file name, but its not really an issue. At least now I can stop having to crop everything again thank you!

And yes Versaworks still has the same issues. The printers from Roland have always been great for us, thats really the only issue we have with Roland products is the contour cut recognition.   

[Bobby Henderson]

The export for screens behavior of automatically creating folders to hold exported art files is (I think) something more friendly for web development. It helps keep the assets more organized in that regard.

Roland's printers are pretty good, but they really need to step up their game with VersaWorks. I can't tell from just quickly searching online, but it doesn't look like VersaWorks has an Adobe certified PDF print engine and the various benefits that come with it. Several other rival large format RIP applications fully support Adobe's PDF standards (Onyx, RasterLink Pro, Caldera, etc).

Some of my co-workers hated our old VP-540 thermal inkjet printer because of all the extra time that was needed to handle prints. They had to be allowed to out-gas for so and such many hours before being laminated. That's not an issue with latex-based prints or even prints coming out of our UV flatbed printer. My big problem with our Roland setup was having to work around issues with VersaWorks. But more of my job is spent in front of a computer doing design work than laminating and applying printed graphics.

[simonw99602295]

We aren't terribly rushed at work for the printing, as we predominently do race car wraps. The latex prints are not as good for install, plus now with the multiple inks we use with greens and oranges we print in RGB format and get awesome colour vibrancy now which our racing clients love to stand out on track. 

The issues I have is we do a heck of a lot of go kart kits, and the side pods need to be saved seperately from the rest of the kit to suit the thick laminate needed for just them. Because they normally have a lot of outer glows, drop shadows, gradients etc it means having to jpeg and reopen for the conotur colour path which I have go used to doing. Now its annoying because I can't do this quickly like I could just last week, so I dont know why its changed on me. At least these work arounds aren't as time consuming as it was appearing it was going to be with having continously cropping each file, but ultimately I wish I could go back to last week still... 

[Bobby Henderson]

It is possible to install previous versions of Illustrator, but you can go back only so many build versions.

Overall, we've liked the move from thermal inkjet to latex. Our shop does a lot of vehicle wraps, but the vast majority of those are commercial vehicles. They're typically vans or trucks that don't have the kinds of compound curves you'll find on a race car.

Our newest printer, a HP Latex 700W, can print white ink along with 6 colors. Being able to "sandwich" layers of white ink and color makes a giant difference in print quality for anything that will be backlit. Our flatbed printer also can print white ink. The Roland VP540 we had was not great for printing anything that would be back-lit. The color would wash out bad. We tried doubling or quadrupling the number of print passes. All that did was make the colors too dark for daytime viewing. Prints from our "regular" HP 360 latex printers can wash out when backlit too, but just not as bad as the thermal inkjet prints did.