weird artifact when placing a photo in illustrator

[oldschool]

I'm trying to place a photo into illustrator but getting some weird results. The photo has been edited in photoshop so that it fades to transparent around the edges, allowing it to blend into the background color that I have chosen in illustrator. Everything looks fine when I place it in illustrator, but when I print it on my laser printer, I get a noticeable box of black along the edges that is of a different shade.

See attached photo.

tell me if the steps i took are wrong:

1. edited the photo in photoshop with gradient masks and foreground to background gradient in reverse around the edges to fade to transparent.
2. saved photo as psd (even tried as tif) with transparency preserved.
3. placed photo into illustrator on black background.

 

[Jim Campbell]

First of all: you get marks for not doing the whole thing in Photoshop!

However, is there any specific reason why you can't do the whole BG image in Photoshop and then just float the text on top in Illustrator? Illustrator isn't the ideal application for compositing bitmap elements, so I'd try to do that stuff in Photoshop, which is designed for that purpose and do the typesetting in Illustrator.

Cheers

Jim

 

[oldschool]

First of all: you get marks for not doing the whole thing in Photoshop!

However, is there any specific reason why you can't do the whole BG image in Photoshop and then just float the text on top in Illustrator? Illustrator isn't the ideal application for compositing bitmap elements, so I'd try to do that stuff in Photoshop, which is designed for that purpose and do the typesetting in Illustrator.

Cheers

Jim

jim, thanks for the advice! i would never think to do an entire package in photoshop. some people do and it makes no sense whatsoever hahaha

anyways, are you thinking just make a giant black background image with the photo, and then just place that in illustrator? that makes sense. it will probably completely avoid any issues with color matching.

just a quick question, somewhat related. how do i specify that I want rich black, or two hits of black in illustrator?

 

[Jim Campbell]

just a quick question, somewhat related. how do i specify that I want rich black, or two hits of black in illustrator?

For spot instances of rich black in a document that also has standard K100 black, I just mix a rich black as a separate colour in Illustrator and either add it as a swatch or just keep an object filled with it to one side of the artboard and pick the colour up with the eye dropper.

If all your blacks are going to be rich black, you can change the behaviour of 'normal' black in preferences:

Cheers

Jim

 

[oldschool]

Thank you for the excellent help!