cyberbaffled wrote: Scott, I'm using Illustrator CS4 and Photoshop CS4. In Illustrator, in EDIT>PREFERENCES I've selected pixels for "general" and "stroke". After exporting the image as .jpg (because I'm using it in Dreamweaver) and opening it in Photoshop the IMAGE>IMAGE SIZE is set to pixels. Nevertheless, despite the fact that pixels are chosen in both Illustrator and Photoshop, the exported .jpg file opens ten times larger in the latter. You still have not explained how you are exporting your artwork. Are you using File > Export? Are you using Save for Web and Devices? Are you copying and pasting to Photoshop? Are you opening the Illustrator .ai file in Photoshop and letting Photoshop rasterize? Whichever you are using, what settings are you using? Once again: There is no such unit as pixels in Illustrator. Adobe does not want you to know this, but it is a fact. Pixels, when properly used as a unit of measure for an image, have no physical size. But Illustrator was build to be used for creating vector drawings for print, and that will always be in every Illustrator file’s DNA. Every object and every artboard in an Illustrator file has a physical size, which tells Illustrator how large things will be when they print. That guarantees that pixels cannot ever be used as a unit to define sizes, since pixels have no physical size. Try this: Open an image in Photoshop and look at the size in Image > Image Size. Let’s use a 72 pixels by 72 pixels file that is 72 pixels per inch. It’s easy to see that, when printed, the image should be a square, one inch wide and one inch tall. Place that image in Illustrator and that’s what you’ll get. Save a copy, but with one change: change the resolution to 144 pixels per inch (Resample set to None). Now import that image into Illustrator. You will get the same image, but only one half inch wide and tall. Switch units to pixels, and your 72 pixels by 72 pixel image will be reported as being 36 pixels by 36 pixels. How can that be? It can’t. Illustrator is assuming you will export your file as a raster image at 72 pixels per inch, so the half-inch image will end up being 36 pixels wide. Photoshop and Illustrator are very different programs, for good reason. Photoshop is a pixel based graphics program. Everything in Photoshop is pixels, so it’s a simple idea to keep the pixel size (defined under Image > Image Size) consistent throughout one file. But Illustrator is object oriented, and some of those object can be pixel-based, such as the appearance of a drop shadow effect, artwork rasterized within Illustrator, or artwork imported into Illustrator. Each of these types of object can have its own defined pixel size. Each of these objects can be further enlarged or reduced in Illustrator, further varying the pixel size for each object. How can one entire document use pixels as a unit of measure when there are several objects built out of pixels that all use different sized pixels? Answer: it can’t because it is impossible. When you use pixels, Illustrator is assuming you are preparing artwork for screen, like a presentation or a web page. So Illustrator decides that each point (1/72 inch) will correspond to one pixel. If you export your file at 72 pixels per inch (which is what you do when you use Save for Web and Devices) you end up with what you expect, since a one inch line in Illustrator is 72 points (also called pixels in Illustrator). But if you export at any other resolution, you end up with a different sized line. Adobe had made several mistakes with Illustrator, going back decades. They show no sign of caring that Illustrator is a dog’s breakfast of poorly thought out features, awful interfaces, overall unintuitiveness, and just all around USDA choice fuçk-up. Using pixels as a unit of measure has been, in hindsight, one of their biggest mistakes. Someone should have been fired for adding it but, knowing Adobe, they probably got a promotion and a great parking spot. To reiterate, I'm rastorizing a file and exporting it to .jpg because that's the format that works in Dreamweaver. If you plan to open the image in Photoshop to edit it, then DO NOT use JPG as the format for export from Illustrator. Use a lossless format. Once the image is as you want it in Photoshop you should save it as a TIF or PSD (especially if using adjustments or layers) as well as a JPG for Dreamweaver.
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