When I get any response about these articles, they’re usually from someone asking about where they can get some useful, practical knowledge about what programs are out there and how to learn to use them. Once someone even asked me if I’ve written tutorials.

Well, the other day I was doing something that I do on a daily basis, using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop together to render a station’s logo, and I thought it might be a good technique to share. I’m not going to actually tell you how to render a logo, but rather tell you a way to make it easier. Also keep in mind that this isn’t a tutorial on these two programs, merely a technique that uses both of them.

The good thing about using these two programs is that they come from the same company, Adobe. That means that files, elements, clipboard items, and the like are easily exchanged between the two programs, in a word; they talk to each other. In addition, the folks at Adobe have made an effort (in the latest versions) to even start using the same user interface and keystrokes in both programs. This makes the learning curve much faster. The user interface is even the same on different platforms, although why anyone would use anything except a Mac is beyond me. This commonality and ease of sharing items amongst programs even extends to a third program from Adobe, After Effects, which is worth a column or two of its own when I get the time.

When you start out with a logo, either design it yourself, or get it from the original designers in Illustrator format. If you get it from an outside source, ask that they turn all of the text into outlines, which will make them into Postscript paths, and avoid the need for you to have the fonts that they used in the file. This is important because an Illustrator file is resolution independent, meaning that you can endlessly scale parts of a logo without sacrificing image quality. It also means that you can break the logo into separate pieces, and put them on separate layers, something that will come in handy later on when you go to paint the pieces, or render a logo. For the sake of this tutorial, let’s assume that you received a logo from a client, which you’ll have to prepare for broadcast use.

The first thing to do is to open the file in Illustrator. Open it, and immediately copy all of the contents of the file into a new file, set up as a 640 X 480 points document oriented horizontally. Make crop marks in this document by making a 640 X 480 point rectangle, and positioning it precisely over the corner of document. Use Crop marks:Make item from the menu (which menu depends on what version of Illustrator you’re using...) to turn it into a crop mark. These marks will act like registration marks later on to lock all of the layers of a logo into place. This file, when rasterized into Photoshop, will equate to 640 X 480 pixels, or roughly a square pixel, television aspect ratio image. If you do a lot of this kind of thing, you might save this document (without anything else in it, except the crop marks) as an Illustrator Template.

Scale up all of the elements of the logo until it very nearly fills the frame. The rule for rendering logos is: make it as large as possible. You can always shrink a logo later, but if you rasterize it, and then blow it up, it’ll get fuzzy. Now separate the logo into layers that represent the layers you’d like to have in your final Photoshop file. Think about which element is in front and which is behind in the logo. What division of the logo will make it easier to paint? Sometimes this ends up being the individual colors of a logo (say, a blue layer and a black layer and a red layer...) and other times it reflects the order of the elements from back to front. Save the file.

Now here’s the trick. Open both Illustrator and Photoshop. In Illustrator, select one layer and toggle the print check box for that layer to on. Turn off the print box on all of the other layers. Save the file. Jump to Photoshop and open the file. It will ask you about the size and mode to open it with, and it usually supplies the correct answer (640 by 480 pixels in RGB mode). It will then rasterize (that is, turn it into a painted, bitmap image...) the image, but only the layer that was marked for printing. Name the layer, and jump back to Illustrator. Turn off the print box on the first layer, turn it on in another layer, and save the file again. In Photoshop, place (using the menu item File:Place) the same file over the first layer, and it will rasterize the next layer locked in registration to the first. Go back to Illustrator and repeat the layer print toggling (and saving) and Photoshop Placing until you’ve rasterized all of the layers. Save the image in Photoshop under another name. Whew!

Now it’s an easy matter to paint each of the individual layers in Photoshop, or further divide them into additional layers for manipulation if need be.

The most difficult thing about rendering a complex Illustrator file in Photoshop is a way to break it up into easier to handle pieces before trying to paint the parts, thus saving yourself a lot of complicated masking techniques. It’s really nice that both programs have layers to help you with this, but as of now, Photoshop doesn’t directly recognize Illustrator’s layers, or make use of them. If it could image each of the layers and keep them on their own Photoshop layer, then this technique would become obsolete. I look forward to that day.