Illustrator quick tip

Written on 06 Mar 2008, 2 comments, 2100 hits

Have you ever tried to draw some vector art in Illustrator in RGB mode and tried to paste it as a smart object in Photoshop?
I guess you had

But the problem occurs when you try to paste a 3D Object from Illustrator. It will end up in Photoshop as a CMYK object messing up your colors. What to do then ?
After I tried several methods to overcome this annoying bug (exported my 3D artwork as a PNG and placed into Photoshop) I found an easier way to achieve this.

Digg this

So let’s say you have a piece of vector art in Illustrator that looks like the image above and you want to make it 3D (for the sake of design) like this:

... using the 3D Extrude & bevel located in the Effects menu of Illustrator

Great! Now let’s import it in Photoshop as a Smart Object. You’ll be very dissapointed, as I was to see that you get

So how do we resolve this thing?

Well… it’s pretty simple:

• We expand the 3D object as a vector group (Object -> Expand Appearance)
• We copy the whole group (Command + C on Mac, CTRL + C on Windows)
• We paste it in Photoshop’s canvas as a Smart Object (Command + V, CTRL + V)
• And we’re done

Filed under: Tutorials | See the comments (2) | Post a comment !

2 Comments

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Dever  From Romaniaon Mar 07

I think you should’ve mentioned the version too. I think smart objects were introduced in Photoshop starting with CS2.

Alex Buga  From Romaniaon Mar 07

I supposed everyone has CS3, or at least CS2.

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