Raster Gradients?

[Richard. S.]

Hi everyone.

Although I have been using Photoshop for many years, I am new to Illustrator.

I am under the impression that gradients are raster, and am therefore wondering - surely this means that gradients should be avoided if you want the image to be truly scalable - otherwise it seems pointless to create a vector image, if the gradient won't upscale with the rest of the image?

Can someone confirm if gradients are always rasters, and therefore need to be avoided.

Thank you all in advance.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

Gradients in Illustrator are not based on pixels and are scalable.

[Richard. S.]

Thanks Ton,

does this mean that a photoshop .grd file will also be vector and ok to use in illustrator, or are photoshop gradient files raster?

Thank you.

[Ton Frederiks]

Photoshop gradients are pixels, you can zoom in and change the color of a single pixel in the gradient, which is not possible in Illustrator because they are made using algorithms

[Richard. S.]

Onca again - thanks Ton.

I'm still trying to get used to Illustrator, and having a hard time working out the different ways of doing things.

So, I'm presuming that if I am online looking for Illustrator gradients, I have to ensure that they are Illustrator gradient files, as opposed to Photoshop gradient files. Do Illustrator gradient files have a different file extension from .grd?

I have no idea how to tell one gradient from another 😞

Thank you for your patience - sorry for my newbie questions 🙂

[Ton Frederiks]

Gradients can be saved and shared as swatches. They don't have their own extension. Swatches files are Illustrator files and have the .ai extension