Saving complex artwork as picture file then re importing into Ai

[David Bathe]

Dear Adobe Community, I've been using Illustrator to produce large scale technical illustrations. Most of these are highly complex over muliple layers. To make the life simpler for me and the producion, I like to save the finished illustration as a jpg in 100% scale/900dpi and then re inport the image into a new illustrator file of the same dimentions and then add the text, graphics etc around. Doing it this allows me to move or rotate the image/illustration to into final position far simpler than the multi layered option. I then export the file as a PDF to be sent for production on super high quality digital plotters

My questions to the experts is:

What would be the best file type to save the original illustion?

what would be the optimal resolution?

What would be the optimal pdf settings for the final production files?

Is this a good way or is there a better/more correct way of doing this?

I have been using Ai since 1988 and still haven't got any idea how it works or the correct way to do things!

The technical suff simply isn't my thing.

You can see the type of work a do at www.davidbathe.com

This is a genuine request for those knowlegable in such matters to help me out here.

Peace and love, David.

[Monika Gause]

So those are CAD like drawings?

Or more photorealistic ones? Instead of having us hunt that down on your website, how about posting an example in this thread?

[David Bathe]

Sure, didn't see the attachement link.

[Monika Gause]

i suppose that this artwork contains a lot of effects, opacity masks, blurring etc. anyway, right?

Then saving them as a raster format and then placing them in Illustrator makes a lot of sense.

I would discuss the resolution with the printing service. If you later send off a PDF, then JPG makes sense as well (it's in the PDF most of the time anyway). 

[David Bathe]

Thanx. Yes indeed, the individual parts are illustrated 100% finished size on different layers so they can be modified as more detailed information becomes available and the parts, textures, gradients and transparences are drawn and made in Ai. and because engineering parts are simpler to create horizontaly, drawn at 180/90 degrees.  Obviously the finished drawing needs to be rotated to create the finished poster, thus the request.

The finished poster will not be scaled lager than the printing file so no need for vector scaling after this point.

So you're saying saving the artboard as a jpg is correct.

better than an eps of tiff?

Sorry for these questions but I've tried reading about it and frankly, I'm too old to understand it all LOL.

[Monika Gause]

Just forget EPS. That would be the worst file format for this by hundreds of miles.

You could think about TIFF, because it's lossless, but when you export it as a PDF, you will compress images as JPG, anyway, no? If you export PDF with uncompressed images, then TIF makes sense.

[David Bathe]

Awesome! Seems I'm doing the right thing. Go Forest Gump!

Appriciate your feed back.

The exporting the pdf part isn't something I've actually understood as well.

I normall save as pdf and use the default settings. I believe that without specifying any picture compression?

So Tiff or jpg will work the same? The jpg images are much smaller than the Tiff equivilant I remember. But the pdfs made from an Ai file containing a Tiff image always printed out very well.

Could that be correct or am I just imagining it. Much simpler with smaller files.  

[Monika Gause]

When exporting a PDF you have to specify how images get embedded. Please discuss this with your print service provider. They can assist you what is the best solution.

With the default setting, images will be JPEG compressed. Make sure you set the quality to Maximum.

[David Bathe]

Appriciate your feedback.

[Monika Gause]

You're welcome.