3.5 Saving Files

Hey guys, let's end the week nice and easy with a quick lesson on saving files in Adobe Illustrator. Now, Illustrator is a very versatile program. It can output vector files, and it can also output just regular images like Photoshop or other programs can. Now lets look at all the different options we have for saving the files and some of the interesting quirks, if you will, about saving different file types. There's a couple ways to save a file in Adobe Illustrator. Obviously, they're both through the File menu. But you can Save As. You can Save a Copy, that's kind of obvious. And Save for Web. Those are the real two ones we're gonna focus on, the Save As and Save for Web. Save Selective Slices is for the slicing tool. And Save as Template. is really to create a default document with certain settings in Illustrator. If you're going to be making the same thing over and over again, you may want to save it as a template. First, let's look at our save as options. A pretty basic dialogue box that you're probably used to seeing, And we're going to look here at the format menu. Let's look at all the different formats so you can see here we can save a plain old dobe illustrator file that's .ai, standing for Adobe llustrator obviously. Then we can save an illustrator eps file right here. And an EPS file is basically a generic sort of postscript file. In fact, EPS stands for encapsulated postscript. Which is a nice vector file that will maintain a good amount of your art data, except for maybe a few different effects that you can have, only in Illustrator. And lets you output those and give them to say, somebody with CorelDraw or somebody with any older version of Illustrator. All these things are really, really compatible. So you can basically use an EPS anywhere. In fact, if you're gonna give something to a t-shirt shop, or you're gonna give something to a printer, you might want to give them an EPS. Here we have another option again to save as a template if we wish. We could save it as an Adobe PDF. So the Illustrator files can output PDFs and they will retain their vector properties. So it'll be one of those PDFs that when you zoom in, It'll still be nice and clear and easy to read. And it does that for text and images inside of Illustrator documents. Adobe FXG file, we don't really use those very often. And then, finally, we have SVG files. Now there's plenty of articles on the web that can tell you about SVG's, but SVG stands for scalable vector graphic. That's basically a type of image on the web that will allow you to size up, zoom in, zoom out and not lose quality displaying your vector artwork in its full vector perfection. On the web and on different devices like, TOM TOMS use SVG files, your many cell phones have SVG files for their graphics to account for different screen sizes. There's plenty of benefits to SVG files, but right now we're gonna go to in an Illustrator file and we're gonna hit Save. And we're gonna give it a different name so it doesn't just save over it. Now we get another option, where we're asked to say what version of Illustrator we're saving this for. And you can see, we go down all the way to these important versions of Illustrator, and you can see they're skipping some numbers. Well, these are the versions of the Illustrator that are either the most recent, right? Or, when you see spaces like eight and three, Those are times when there are major revisions to the Illustrator format. And finally a Japanese Illustrator which, I'm not entirely sure. I've never had to use that option. Next, we have create a PDF compatible file, substituting fonts, right? You can Have it change the font, so if somebody doesn't have the fonts. You can embed your ICC, that's color profiling, use compression, really keeping your files small. And if you have multiple artboards, you can make each artboard in your document a separate Illustrator file right here. Finally we have things about transparency that we don't have to worry about. We'll hit OK. Next is saving things for web and devices. Now when we save for web, you can see we get a whatever pixel size version of our image exists. And if we zoom in, and I can do that with command plus, you can see this is a PNG, right? So we do have pixels. So Illustrator can output regular old images like what you see here. And, in fact, over here in our tools, you can see all the different files that we can select. Let's make it a JPG. And we'll zoom in on our JPG, and we can see the pixels. Watch when we slide our quality. So you can see this is the same type of image compression that you would get with, say, an Adobe Photoshop. Again, you have an option to save as an SVG here, you can also save as an SWF file, so that's a Flash file. If somebody has something in Flash, or they need an output of that, you can use that. You could also take stuff in Illustrator and copy and paste it right into Flash, or right into Photoshop, or right into InDesign. And that stuff should all be able to scale up and scale down, as long as you, I think in Photoshop, it's called a smart object, and in the other programs it should just scale. Obviously, with some conversion things depending on your medium, right? So, there's a lot of options for saving file in Illustrator and if you say, wanted a lot of details. And I'll put it in PNG mode. When we zoom out, this is the size it's gonna save it as. If we come over here to image size, we get the exact pixel count and what percentage. Now we can say, let's save this as 400% and hit apply. What that's gonna do is rerender our picture. And blow it up four times. So, now you can see with have 3,000 pixels for our width, 1,700 something for our height. And when we zoom in, yeah there's pixels, but the image has gotten so much finer That it's impossible to tell at a pretty large scale that you're pixelated. So we hit Save and that will output a file. I'm not gonna do that just cuz we don't need the extra file in there, but that's saving in Illustrator. Now, Illustrator doesn't have auto save or anything like that. In fact, Adobe has yet to implement any stateless sort of automatic save in their programs. So, save early, save often. If you're about to do something and you're not sure of what the results are gonna be, Save. You know illustrator has a long history, and you're able to undo a lot of steps, but save. Save a lot, and make sure to save Illustrator documents, if you want to be able to reuse it. If your just Interested in getting an image out, save the image and save the Illustrator document too. Because you're never know if you're going to need to change or tweak it. That is saving in Illustrator. Coming up in next week's lesson we're going to be dealing with all the powerful palettes. And all the crazy things that you can do with them. There's a lot of them. Alot of complex controls, but that's gonna set us up for success when it comes to effects.