Learn Photoshop - From Illustrator to Photoshop and Back Again!

By David Peters

No one can dispute the power of the Illustrator and Photoshop programs. Individually these are great programs, but when you combine elements of both, anything is possible. Artists many time use features from both Photoshop and Illustrator to create beautiful artwork for publishing. There are three basic ways to move a file from Photoshop to Illustrator.

Both programs respond to a File - Place command to either "place" Illustrator artwork into a Photoshop file or a Photoshop image into an Illustrator document. This is the most traditionally used method among users for moving a file from one program to the other. The caution in this method is that the artwork or image must be in a file format readable by the other program.

While Photoshop is very versatile in its ability to read multiple file formats, Illustrator is more limited in the formats it understands. However, once a file is in a readable format such as TIFF, GIF, JPEG etc, you can use the above mentioned File - Place command and select the image. Illustrator will "place" the desired image inside of the Illustrator file, and you will have some ability to modify the file within Illustrator.

The second way to introduce a Photoshop file into Illustrator (or vice versa) is the tried-and-true Clipboard. Simply copy the file elements you want from one program using the Copy command, and paste it into the other program using the Paste command. There are limitations to using the Copy-Paste method. It doesn't work so well for large files, and you can easily swamp the receiving program by pasting a large file into it.

The third method for converting a file from one program into the other is dragging and dropping. To perform this method, both programs must be open. Decide on the artwork you want to transfer, and simply drag it out of the Photoshop window onto the Illustrator window. To take Illustrator art into Photoshop, simply select the artwork from an open Illustrator window, drag it to an open Photoshop window and drop it into Photoshop.

One last tip is that you can place paths from Photoshop to Illustrator files by using the Path Selection tool in Photoshop. With this feature, simply pick the paths you want to move and paste them into Illustrator.

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