Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 11/7/2009

Question
I spent the day making a 24" x 30" poster.  I started in Photoshop, saved as a eps, placed it in Illustrator CS4, added text, outlined the text, saved as a ai file and as an eps.  The PSD file was 25mb, the Photoshop EPS was 50 mb, the ai file was 45 mb and the illustrator files was 495 mb. I spent the day trying to get it down to under 15 mb to send to a vendor over the internet. My boss was not happy, I never accomplished it, but he says the other artist that was gone does it all the time. Why was my file so large. I set up the same size page with text only in Illustrator and it saved as a 14.5 mb file, but they wanted graphics on it. What was a doing wrong. It's been an awful day.......feel really stupid!

Answer
Hi Krystal,

This all really just has to do with the type of files you are saving out.

First, you can save your PSD out as a hi-res jpg and still have the same quality with a much lower file size. In the JPG dialog box, be sure to make it "maximum" quality.

Next, save the AI file out as a PDF, not an .eps. EPS's are always much larger since they are normally used to save out spot colors and channel information as well as the graphics.

If you do not care about spot colors, save this as a "press quality" PDF with the crop marks turned on under "marks and bleeds".

Thanks

Kevin