Opening Photoshop EPS with Illustrator...

I recently received a couple of 50MB EPS files from a client that were
created using Photoshop. When I opened the files in Illustrator (which
took forever) the text was vector, but it was all cut apart, seemingly
arbitrarily, and masked - releasing the mask revealed a small rectangle
of black. I deleted this, and re-colored the text. After cleaning all
the text in this manner, the file size dropped to 16MB.
I tested this myself by creating a Photoshop EPS 12" x 18" with just the
text "This Is A Test" - the file was 120MB and was masked when opened in
Illustrator. I should also mention that the option "Include vector
data" was checked in both instances.
My question is this: Why does Photoshop mask all the text when saving as
an EPS and what can I tell my clients to do to remedy this situation?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.


Jim (aka LawnElf)

LawnElf wrote:
> I recently received a couple of 50MB EPS files from a client that were
> created using Photoshop. When I opened the files in Illustrator (which
> took forever) the text was vector, but it was all cut apart, seemingly
> arbitrarily, and masked - releasing the mask revealed a small rectangle
> of black. I deleted this, and re-colored the text. After cleaning all
> the text in this manner, the file size dropped to 16MB.
> I tested this myself by creating a Photoshop EPS 12" x 18" with just the
> text "This Is A Test" - the file was 120MB and was masked when opened in
> Illustrator. I should also mention that the option "Include vector
> data" was checked in both instances.
> My question is this: Why does Photoshop mask all the text when saving as
> an EPS and what can I tell my clients to do to remedy this situation?
>
> Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
> Jim (aka LawnElf)


My two cents.

Photoshop is a raster program. So when you use text it will
be raster.
Importing it into Illustrator is possible nowadays, but
Illustrator will try (and succeeds) to convert it to vector.
Hence the strange effects.

Illustrator still sees these characters as an outlined
vector filled with raster. Raster causes much more file
size. So if you delete that and type it in again, you get
rid of those file size consuming rasters.

You should tell your clients to just give you the PS images
and let you (as a designer I assume) add the text and
possibel vector images. What other reason would there be to
import PS files into Illustrator.