Computer Graphics with Photoshop - DCS file - flattening? spot color? help!

Author

DCS file - flattening? spot color? help!

MisterOwl@gmail.com

2005-08-29, 11:14 pm

Hallo.

I'm working with an Illustrator file that has a linked photoshop DCS
file. This makes it difficult for me to save the AI file as an EPS file
or PDF (workin with IL 10, it says "you can't do this, there's a DCS
file there, too bad so sad").

I've tried to flatten the DCS file to make it into a normal EPS or TIF
file for placement/linking/embedding, but every time I do, the
spot-color layer disappears and the color of the file (it's a logo)
changes, and that's against the rules.

How do I flatten a DCS file without losing the spot-color layer?

TIA!
J

MisterOwl@gmail.com

2005-08-29, 11:14 pm

I'm working with Photoshop 7.0 and Illustrator 10, btw, if that
matters..

Odysseus

2005-08-29, 11:14 pm

In article <1125355411.428282.127660@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
MisterOwl@XXXXXXXXXX wrote:

> I'm working with an Illustrator file that has a linked photoshop DCS
> file. This makes it difficult for me to save the AI file as an EPS file
> or PDF (workin with IL 10, it says "you can't do this, there's a DCS
> file there, too bad so sad").
>
> I've tried to flatten the DCS file to make it into a normal EPS or TIF
> file for placement/linking/embedding, but every time I do, the
> spot-color layer disappears and the color of the file (it's a logo)
> changes, and that's against the rules.
>
> How do I flatten a DCS file without losing the spot-color layer?
>

The spot colour is in a channel, not a layer. The short answer to your
question is that you can't merge the channel with the others while
preserving its spot-colour information.

Can Illustrator place a native Photoshop version? If not, InDesign can.
IME Illustrator is lousy at dealing with spot-colour rasters to start
with.

--
Odysseus

tacit

2005-08-29, 11:14 pm

In article <1125355411.428282.127660@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
MisterOwl@XXXXXXXXXX wrote:

> I'm working with an Illustrator file that has a linked photoshop DCS
> file. This makes it difficult for me to save the AI file as an EPS file
> or PDF (workin with IL 10, it says "you can't do this, there's a DCS
> file there, too bad so sad").

You can save an Illustrator EPS with a placed DCS. It works just fine; I
did it just now as a test. You should, however, make sure that your DCS
file is a single-file DCS, not a multifile DCS.

You will get a warning that a placed DCS file will not interact with
transparency effects correctly. If you aren't trying to place
transparent elements over the DCS, don't worry about it.

However, I'm more concerned with the fact that you are placing a logo
done in Photoshop. Photoshop is the wrong tool for logos. Why wasn't the
logo created in Illustrator?

--
Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink:
all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

MisterOwl@gmail.com

2005-08-30, 7:19 pm

Haha believe me, if I had an Illustrator version of this logo I'd be
pretty darn happy. As it is, we gotta work with what they send us. I've
tried for days now to get an Illustrator version of the same logo but
they apparently would rather go with this messed-up Photoshop one. You
know how clients can be.

I'll keep fighting it, I seem to recall getting some sort of error
message that says "Can't do that, sorry" and only having the option to
click "Okay" which stopped the save process. However, since then, I
have taken the time to "flatten out" the channels and make it into a
normal EPS (The previous poster was right, it's not a "layer" thing, it
was a "channel" thing.. my bad on getting the terminology switched
around, it's been a long couple days).

Anyway, thanks for all the help! Good tip on the placement of
transparent elements over the DCS, I'll remember that for future use.

J