Using Illustrator Objects in Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Using Illustrator files in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Using Adobe Illustrator Objects in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at some ways that you can work with Illustrator objects and files in Photoshop. We'll start by looking at copying objects from Illustrator to Photoshop. We'll look at using Illustrator pattern swatches in Photoshop. We'll look at using shapes created in Illustrator in Photoshop and also how to open Illustrator files inside Photoshop. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Let's get started working with Illustrator content here in Photoshop. 2. Using Illustrator files in Photoshop - Part 1: The first thing we're going to look at in working between Illustrator and Photoshop is how we would take something from Illustrator into Photoshop. I have an illustration here. In Illustrator, I'm going to select over all of these objects, and I'm just going to choose Edit Copy. I'm going to Photoshop and in Photoshop I'm going to choose File New. What Photoshop is going to do is measure out what it is that on the window's clipboard and it's going to make a document of that size, which is the size of the artwork that I'm bringing in, so I'll click, OK. Now I can paste the artwork in and I can do this in one of a number of ways. Let's choose Edit Paste. When we choose Edit Paste, we get four options. Smart Object, Pixels, Path and Shape Layer. I'm going to select Shape Layer first of all and click OK. What we get is a Shape Layer. Obviously from what we're seeing here, that's really not an appropriate choice to make. I'm just going to undo that so I'll choose Edit Undo. Let's do edit paste and then this time let's choose Path and again, I'll click OK. Now this brings the object into Photoshop as a path, you can see it here in the paths palette. Again, that's not really going to help us in terms of working with this piece of artwork in Photoshop, I'm going to undo that. Lets choose Edit Paste, and this time let's choose Pixels, and I'll click OK. Now when we choose pixels, what we get is the image as a flattened raster image inside Photoshop. It's fixed at this size and also the link to illustrate has been totally broken so these are just pixels in Photoshop. Let's undo that because there is one final option which is really going to work a whole lot better than any of the others for us and that is to choose Smart Object. I'm going to choose Paste Smart Object and click OK. Now, in this instance, the image is pasted into Photoshop and it comes in at the same size that it was before. But it's a smart object. As a smart object, we can alter the size of this so we could increase it in size and we wouldn't lose the smooth edges that we would expect to get if it was scaled up, for example, in Illustrator. But there are other features that are available to us as a result of pasting this into Photoshop as a Smart Object. I'm just going to double-click on the Vector Smart Object here. The illustration opens back up in Illustrator, but it's not the same one that we took to Photoshop and let's just prove that to ourselves here. Now, I've selected over this caravan and I'm just going to click here and choose a different color for it. Let's make this a blue caravan and let's give it a different color door. We'll give it a darker color door and click OK. We're just going to press Escape to get back out of isolation mode.. Here is recolored illustration. What I'm going to do here, it's called vector Smart Object AI. I'm just going to close it and I'm going to say yes to saving it. Now when we go back to Photoshop, you'll see that our caravan has been recolored, so we're able to work with it as an embedded illustrator object inside our Photoshop document. Back in Illustrator, we've still got the original, nothing that we did changed the original. What we're doing is we're working with a copy of the original embedded inside our Photoshop document as an illustrator piece of art, this can be scaled. If we were to increase the canvas, let's actually do that using the crop tool because that's a much easier way of increasing canvas. I'm just dragging out what's holding the ALT key and go drag up holding the ALT key. Click the check mark, that's going get shape and I'm just going to hold the Shift key and the ALT key to just scale it up. When I go and click the check mark, everything's nicely smoothed out so we're not getting those edges that we might expect to see if we were to increase the size of a piece of art like that if it were pixel-based in Photoshop. There's one way that you can work between Illustrator and Photoshop. You can bring Illustrator objects into Photoshop, paste them in a Smart Objects, and then there is still a retained link to Illustrator, which means that you could take these to illustrate to work with them there. Now, you might be wondering why you would bring an object from Illustrator into Photoshop to work with it. Well, let's just go and see how we could work with this object here. First of all, I'm just going to select the background layer that's visible here and press Control Backspace, Command Delete to fill it with the white background color that I have here. Let's go now and let's open up a texture image. I have a texture image here that I downloaded from escalate or mass. I'm just going to open that here in Photoshop and here is the texture image. Now, I'm going to take that and put that on top of my little caravan image. I'm going to right-click it and choose Duplicate Layer. From the document drop-down list, I'm going to select the caravan image size working in is called Untitled one, and I'll click OK. What that does is it copies this particular image into a caravan image. Now I can blend it in to the layers below. Well, let's actually just resize it first cause it's looking like it's not the right size. To see the sizing handles on the screen press Control 0. That will bring up the sizing handles what it actually shrinks the document to the extent that you can then see your sizing handles. I'm just going to make my texture a little bit bigger, that's a bit better. Now let's go and choose a blend mode. On the page, I'm just running down the list by pressing the down arrow key, on the Mac, you'll need to make sure that you're not using a brush tool and you can press Shift Plus and Shift Minus to go down the list. Here you can say that it's very easy for us to apply a texture across this illustration in Photoshop and if this were for the web or if it were for scrapbooking or something like that then this might be a better way of applying a texture, it's certainly nice and fast. I've got a blend mode here of overlays. That's a possibility for using a texture like this with an image and of course, this Smart Object layer still contains that illustrator object. The texture is just being applied using a blend mode on a top layer. This layer here is fully editable. We double-click on it and the object opens up back in illustrator so we could make changes to it in Illustrator. There's one way to work between illustrator and Photoshop and handy for things like textures, really like that sort of effect. 3. Using Illustrator files in Photoshop - Part 2: Another way that we can work between Illustrator and Photoshop is with patterns. I'm going to open up my swatches palette. I have a pattern swatch here, that is one that comes shipped with Illustrator. I've just dragged and dropped it out of the swatches palette into the document. This is not the actual patterns swatch, the actual patterns swatch is on the up in the top corner here. We're going to have to break this down to its component pieces because there's only part of this that we're going to take to Photoshop. It is the part that is contained within this rectangle here. I'm going to take this path which is at the very bottom of this layer and I'm going to move it up to the top of the group, because when it's on the top of the group, I can use it to crop the image. I'm just going to shift click on these other objects. I have selected this rectangular path and all the objects that go to comprise this pattern. I'm going to open the pathfinder and I'm going to click here on crop. When I do that, what Illustrator does is it crops away anything that is excess to our requirements. This is the actual pattern swatch for that pattern. I'm going to select it, I'm going to choose Edit, Copy. I'm going into Photoshop and I'm going to choose File and then New. Now, the size of the document here is the size of the pattern swatch. For now I'm just going to click OK. I'm going to choose Edit and then Paste. I'm going to paste it as a smart object. Before we click the Check Mark, we need to have a look at this option here. Right now I'm just going to undo this. I'm going to zoom in a bit so that we can see more clearly what is about to happen. Let's do Edit, Paste and will choose Smart Object. This is the pattern paste that we're bringing in from Illustrator. There's a very big difference between selecting Anti-alias on and not. Am turning Anti-alias on and if you watch across the top line of this document, what happens when I click the check mark, it starts to fade out and the ultimate result is that we're actually going to have a line around our pattern. The pattern really hasn't worked very well. I'm going to undo this paste. I'm going go back and do it again. This time I'm going to make sure that Anti-alias is turned off. When I click the check mark, the pattern is going to maintain itself accurately around all four edges. We're not going to get what we often see in Illustrator which has lines through our patterns. I'm going to choose, Select, All, and then Edit, Define Pattern. This is going to be Illustrated pattern and I'll click OK. Then we're going to create a brand new file with File, New. It is going to be 3600 by 3600 pixels in size, click OK. This is sort of a standard scrapbook size, if you like. I have white as my background color. I'm going to press control backspace command, delete to fill this lab with white. Now let's go and fill the next layer with our pattern. I'll choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, I'll click OK. This is my pattern coming in at a 100 percent scale. Let's just take it up to 200 and we can see more clearly when we zoom into it to prove to ourselves that we have no lines running through this pattern. This pattern is intact. Of course the problem is that we brought in the pattern at such a small size, it's only a 110 pixels wide. Let's get rid of this document and let's see how we could improve the size of our pattern pace. One way we can do that is by going to the pattern in Illustrator, selecting the Select tool, selecting all over this shape, and then holding the Shift key as we drag on the outside edge to enlarge the pace that we're taking to Photoshop. Because this is a vector object, you can see that it's very nicely resized. Just going to zoom out a little bit. Let's select either the object which is now considerably larger than it was. Edit, Copy, go to Photoshop, create a new document with File, New. This time you can see that the pattern pace is nearly three times the size that it was before. Click OK, Edit, Paste Smart Object, click OK, making sure Anti-alias is not selected and click the check mark. This is now our pattern pace. We can Select, All, and make it into Illustrator pattern number 2. Go back into a test document where our patterns are. Just going to double-click on the pattern fill layer and we'll go and select the last pattern in the list, which is the one that we just created. Let's just drop it down to a 100 percent, because there, it is most accurate. Zoom in and you can see that it is a nice pattern. Of course, the other thing that we could do is when we bring it into Photoshop, we could just create it as a larger document and then scale it there. We could choose File and then New. Now, at the moment it's coming in at 326 by 329. We could double this, so I'm just going to double each of these values. Double those values to 652 by 658. I'll click OK. I'll do Edit, Paste, Smart Object, click OK. It's coming in smaller, but all I need to do is to hold Shift and Alt to scale it out. Go make sure that it snaps to these edges, that's critical because this document is going to be our pattern paste. Make sure Anti-alias is turned off, so that we don't get those edges that are softer. Click the check mark. Select everything, remake pattern for the third time. Go back into the document that we've been working with, double-click on the layer thumbnail and select the last most pattern in the list. This one's at double the size. By bringing it in as a smart object and then scaling it before we actually commit to making it a pattern, we've got a very large patent pace and it's seamless. We're not getting any of those lines that we get sometimes in Illustrator patterns and sometimes it's just easier to make your pattern in Photoshop. You can certainly bring pattern paces from Illustrator to Photoshop very, very easily. Of course, if you wanted to grunge this up and use it as a piece of scrapbook paper. Then we have all those grunge and blend tools available in Photoshop, many of which are just easier to use in Photoshop than they are in Illustrator. 4. Using Illustrator files in Photoshop - Part 3: Another thing what we can do between Photoshop and Illustrator is to take shapes that we've created in Illustrator and use them inside Photoshop, and we can save them as custom shapes there. I've created this shape which is the basis for a Moroccan Trellis Pattern, and I've created it in Illustrator, so it's a really nice shape, and I want to take it to Photoshop. It is just a line with no fill, so I'm going to choose Edit, Copy here in Illustrator. I'm going to Photoshop, and I'm going to choose File, New. The file size is going to be the same size as the shape that I have in Illustrator, so I'm going to click "OK". I'm going to choose Edit, and I'm going to choose Paste, and I'm going to paste it as a path, and I'll click "OK". This is now pasted as a path into Photoshop, and here is my last palette. Now if I go into the Paths panel, something curious happens here. When I select on this path and try to go to Edit, you'll see that Define Custom Shape is grayed out. It looks like we can't use this path to actually make a shape, but that's not true. What we need to do is to go over here to the Paths palette, which you can get to by choosing Window and then Paths, if it's not visible, and we're going to drag this path onto the New icon here, and that's going to create a duplicate of the path. Look what happens here. You'll see that the path now has all its anchor points showing. When it looks like that, you can now go and choose Edit and Define Custom Shape, and so this is my Moroccan Trelis, and I'll click "OK", and that's now a custom shape inside Photoshop. When I select the Custom Shape Tool here, and go to the custom shapes, it's going to be the very last shape in a panel here. I can use this exactly the same way as I would use any shape in Photoshop. Illustrator doesn't actually have a tool like this for saving custom shapes, so it's really quite handy to be able to save them in Photoshop anyway so that you can use them and reuse them. Of course, pattern-making in Photoshop does not suffer from those funny lines that we tend to get when we're working in Illustrator. So you may prefer to make the shapes for your patterns in Illustrator, and then bring them into Photoshop, and use them to make patterns in Photoshop. 5. Using Illustrator files in Photoshop - Part 4: Our final method of looking at working in Photoshop with assets that you've created or have been created in Illustrator is looking at a way that we can open Illustrator files inside Photoshop. If you have an Illustrator file, you can open it direct inside Photoshop with obviously some limitations. Now what you won't be able to do is go to the file in Windows Explorer or Finder, and just double-click on the AI file because the operating system is going to know that that's an Illustrator file and that it should be opened in Illustrator. I'm locating an AI file and I'm just going to click open. When we open it, we get this import PDF dialog. What we are importing is a flattened version of the Illustrator image. We get a few choices here, we're just going to look at this. Crop to bounding box will just ensure that it's cropped to the artwork and so you won't get extra space on the page, so that's a really good option to choose. You can also change the thumbnail size. They're probably set too small so you may want to a fit page so you can actually see what's coming in. I suggest you select crop to bounding box. I also suggest that you select anti-aliased because anti-aliased means that these edges are going to be smooth the way Photoshop smooths things. Otherwise, you're going to get quite pixelated edges. Now you can set the image size here. There are specifications here you can see it in inches or centimeters, whatever makes sense to you. Pixels makes more sense to me. Provided you have constrained proportions selected, which you should, then you can type in different values in here. For example, if I want my image width to be 6,000 pixels, then the height would be 2,801 because that would constrain it to its original proportions, but I could bring it in at a larger size if I wanted to. Given that this is going to be a flattened bitmap image, you want to bring it in at the size you need it to work with in Photoshop, because we wanting to upscale it because it is no longer a vector. Once you've selected all of these options, just click "OK" to go ahead. This is the image inside Photoshop. Let's have a look in the last palette. You'll see that this is just a latch, just a bitmap layer. It's not a smart object, so we can't take it back into Illustrator by double-clicking on it. This is just flattened pixels, but the image has been sized. If you go to Image, Image Size, you'll see that it is 6,000 by 2,801. It comes in at the size that we want it. If you just want a flattened version of data from an Illustrator file, then you can just open the Illustrator file in Photoshop and that's the way to do it. There's four ways that you can work with assets that you've created or somebody else's created in Illustrator that you can work with them in Photoshop. Your project for this course is going to be to take some content that you've created in Illustrator or some Illustrator files that perhaps you've found online, and work with them in Photoshop. You can find them at a site called Vecteezy, if you don't have your own or I'll give you a link to that site. If you have Illustrator, you can go and open the images in Illustrator, make selections, and then bring those in by copying them and pasting them into Photoshop. Experiment with working with them as smart objects, experiment with working with shapes that you created in Illustrator, and coming in and saving them as custom shapes in Photoshop. You may also want to experiment with opening content that has been created in Illustrator as flattened bitmap images like this one in Photoshop. Post some examples of your work in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and you've learned something about working with Illustrator assets in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs-up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.