Pretty much of a newbie here. When I import a graphic, the image quality is quite poor and the colors are dull compared to the original. I am starting with an image in Adobe Illustrator CS3 that is sharp vector art with good, clean colors. I have imported this directly into Freeway 5, I have opened the .ai file in Photoshop and saved it at 300 ppi as a .psd file and also as a tif and, in both cases clicked the “pass thru” button, but the result is always the same low quality image with poor colors. Can you suggest what I am doing to prevent myself from getting sharper detail and better color? I would like to start at this high image level and then reduce the image file size to compare the look of the various options. Thanks -Ted
I have imported this directly into Freeway 5, I have opened the .ai
file in Photoshop and saved it at 300 ppi as a .psd file and also as
a tif and, in both cases clicked the “pass thru” button
First of all, don’t use the pass-through option unless you have a
perfectly-sized, perfectly-optimised web-ready graphic. Otherwise
you’re asking your visitors’ browsers to render TIFFs and even PSDs.
Safari can do it (even though it is way beyond the call of duty), but
it is still a bad idea.
Now, if you’re losing saturation then I suggest converting your image
to sRGB in Photoshop. The web assumes sRGB, so if you use images in
the Adobe RGB colour space - the one more suited to print - you’ll
see a slight loss in vibrancy in some colours.
Sharper detail? Remember that you only have screen-size pixels to
work with. If you’re trying to get better rendering of vectors,
perhaps saving as a PDF and importing that (NOT with the pass-through
option on!) might help? But see if regular Illustrator or Photoshop
files imported not as passthroughs do the trick first.
When just importing the the .ai file directly into Freeway, have you played around with the graphic output settings in Freeway? In the inspector palette you can change the files (as output) to a gif, or jpeg, or png.
Even look at changing the settings for each file type - i.e. jpeg’s are compressed by default at 75% - change that to 85% and there is quite a difference in quality. Or try a png and colour set to millions.
On 10 Feb 2009, at 03:44, Ted wrote:
Pretty much of a newbie here. When I import a graphic, the image quality is quite poor and the colors are dull compared to the original. I am starting with an image in Adobe Illustrator CS3 that is sharp vector art with good, clean colors. I have imported this directly into Freeway 5, I have opened the .ai file in Photoshop and saved it at 300 ppi as a .psd file and also as a tif and, in both cases clicked the “pass thru” button, but the result is always the same low quality image with poor colors. Can you suggest what I am doing to prevent myself from getting sharper detail and better color? I would like to start at this high image level and then reduce the image file size to compare the look of the various options. Thanks -Ted
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