Expert: Amy - 9/28/2007

Question
Amy,
I can see what you mean but what I didn't say was that the tiff is a very large map of an urban area with lots of streets, gardens and houses - 000000's of polygons of white with black edges.
In Freehand you could just click on the greyscale and make the white transparent - why is it such a pain in Illustrator? I kept the backlground transparent in Photoshop but Illustrator loads it as white.
Alan

Answer
Ah... what a pain.

I know exactly what you mean - Quark can do it, too. And I use Quark for my my layouts when I need something like that.

More often, I try to work with transparency, blending, and layers in PhotoShop as much as I can to achieve special effects... and use another product for my layouts.

InDesign and Illustrator can support native PSD with transparency.

I know it's difficult when you have an existing grayscale image... depending on the subject matter, you can't always promote it to a layer and make the whites transparent without fringing or bad artifacts.

Personally, I think it's such a pain in Illustrator because they want you to use another component of the suite... PhotoShop. What Freehand is doing is some sort of image editing, and Adobe wants the image editing to be done in PhotoShop.

Hope this helped explain it a little!? Well, my understanding of it anyway.

-Amy