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E
Eadig
Inspiring
February 14, 2018
Answered

Concerning data transfer between Photoshop and Illustrator

  • February 14, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 509 views

Hello everyone

It's been a while - I moved on in my career and I'm now having to transfer smart objects masked in Photoshop over to Illustrator, then resize the transferred images without losing their quality in Illustrator. I used to do the transfer the other way and get the smart objects of images created using Illustrator over in Photoshop. Does the same thing happen?

Import Artwork from Photoshop ​introduces several methods: using the Open command, the Place command, the Paste command, and the drag-and-drop feature.

Do all of these result in the same resizable images that do not lose quality when resized? I don't know exactly what I got in Illustrator after doing the drag and drop, so a little tip would be appreciated.

Thank you in advance

Ead

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer D Fosse

Yes, indeed.

Moving the file to Illustrator changes nothing. If it's a raster file in Photoshop it's still a raster file in Illustrator, and any resizing will damage the file in some way.

A vector-based file, however, can be scaled indefinitely no matter what application it's in. Vector data can be scaled in Photoshop just as well as in Illustrator - as long as it remains vector.

The best thing you can do is to convert to Smart Object in Photoshop. This way you can do repeated scaling in Photoshop without cumulative quality loss. It will still refer to the original data with each scaling instance. But sooner or later you end up with a final scaling and re-rasterizing/resampling of the original data. That's when you see the quality loss. There's no way to avoid that.

2 replies

D Fosse
Community Expert
D FosseCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
February 14, 2018

Yes, indeed.

Moving the file to Illustrator changes nothing. If it's a raster file in Photoshop it's still a raster file in Illustrator, and any resizing will damage the file in some way.

A vector-based file, however, can be scaled indefinitely no matter what application it's in. Vector data can be scaled in Photoshop just as well as in Illustrator - as long as it remains vector.

The best thing you can do is to convert to Smart Object in Photoshop. This way you can do repeated scaling in Photoshop without cumulative quality loss. It will still refer to the original data with each scaling instance. But sooner or later you end up with a final scaling and re-rasterizing/resampling of the original data. That's when you see the quality loss. There's no way to avoid that.

    E
    EadigAuthor
    Inspiring
    February 15, 2018

    Thanks for the reply.

    I was also wondering if dragging smart objects over to Illustrator can paste lossless scalable objects in there, then it appears smart objects cannot be dragged and dropped to be turned into some other form of  lossless sacalable objects.

    So the best way to peform lossless rescaling deems indeed to be converting images into smart objects and playing around with them. But can you really lose part of original data once you got smart objects?

    c.pfaffenbichler
    Community Expert
    c.pfaffenbichlerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 14, 2018

    Please post meaningful screenshots.

    Unless you are talking exclusively about Shape Layers and Type Layers you are talking about pixels – and those will naturally be affected by scaling in Illustrator. 

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