AI won't flatten artwork or merge layers

[mpkadobe]

I am working with AI CS 11.0.0 on a Mac G4 OS 10.4.11

I designed a poster made up of several photos, each with a drop shadow, and layered upon one another. I want to flatten it all and make a PDF in preparation for printing.

When I go to the Layers pallette and choose Flatten Artwork, nothing happens. nothing changes. The separate layers remain the same.

Also, in the Layers pallette, Merge Selected is grey and unusable. What could be going wrong? Why can't I flatten this poster?

Marc

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

They are rastered images so you might have to go to Object>Flatten Transparency and choose 100% Raster you might then have to also after it is flattened select all the pieces and go back to Object>Rasterize.

Or come to think of it you might be able to select all of the images with drop shadow and simply go to Object Rasterize.

[CHMprepress]

No need to flatten in your Illustrator file, just save a 1.3 pdf, this wil be flattend.

[Larry G. Schneider]

Or better yet, choose the PDFX-1a from the Standards dropdown in the PDF Save dialog. This will flatten everything and will be ready for printing.

[mpkadobe]

Thank you for all your help Wade, CHM, and Larry.

Unfortunately none of the suggestions seem to have worked so I would like to go over what I have done and see if there are any other clues.

I made a poster (see screen shot here http://www.mpkeane.com/Poster/Poster%20SS.png) with many layers of photo images and text. I wish to flatten the file for printing because I was told to do by my printer. This has two purposes: 1) to make the file smaller than the 68Mb it is now, and 2) to collect all the images in a single layer for ease of printing.

• Layer Palette > toggle button in upper right hand corner > Flatten Artwork: This didn’t seem to do anything at all.

• Layer Palette > toggle button in upper right hand corner > Merge Selected: Got an error message that this was not possible.

• Object Menu > Flatten Transparency > The drop shadows on the square images get thin grey lines around them (http://www.mpkeane.com/Poster/Grey%20Lines.png)

• Object Menu > Rasterize > Broke the whole poster into a grid of small squares making a huge file that took 10 minutes to load and had grey grid lines in places where the drop shadows were

• Saving as PDF1.3 didn’t seem to flatten anything. The file was still big and the separate portions of the poster all loaded separately.

• Saving as PDFX-1a is not available on CS 11.0.0 but I tried it on a friend’s computer (CS 3) but again, it didn’t seem to flatten anything. The files is still big and the separate portions of the poster all load separately.

Photos are RGB. Do they need to be CMYK to work?

Photos are linked into poster. I tried embedding the images in the poster but it made the file 248Mb instead of 68Mb and didn’t seem to help with any of the other issues either.

Any hints would be appreciated.

Marc

[JETalmage]

Marc,

You are trying to think of Illustrator (object-based, vector) in Photoshop (single raster image) terms. Two ENTIRELY different worlds.

You don't "flatten" things in Illustrator in the sense that you do in Photoshop. Nor should you want to. Doing that would rasterize the entire file. You are misunderstanding the meanings of every one of the commands you referenced.

68MB is not a large file for a full-page ad in a commercial offset printing workflow. (But I suspect your raster images are grossly oversampled.)

Best practice when designing for full-color offset printing is to work in CMYK, but that's not to say there is anything technically "wrong" with including RGB elements; you're just effectively deciding to "trust" whatever inevitable automatic conversions from RGB to CMYK that most definitely will occur somewhere along the printing workflow.

Frankly (and I do not mean this as insulting, so don't take it that way) if you don't understand the difference between Illustrator and Photoshop any better than this, you really shouldn't be using it for cost-risk work.

From where you are right now, best advice is simply to save the file as a press-ready PDF. The resulting PDF will self-contain all the raster and vector elements. The rasterization ("flattening") of overlapping raster effects will be automatically generated by default settings. If the resulting PDF is 68MB, don't worry about it. If your printer is worried about that, find another printer.

If this is going on press, do a proof before committing to film and plates, and/or have someone who knows what they're doing check it over.

This stuff isn't rocket science, and I don't mean to imply that. But you can get yourself into cost trouble if you don't understand the process.

JET

[mpkadobe]

Thank you JET.

No offense taken. I am not a graphic design professional and it shows.

Good to know that 68Mb is not too big for a full-age ad. I am designing an 18" x 24" poster which is similar in size.

I made a PDF of the AI file and, when I brought it to the printers, they said it needed to be "flattened" and made into a smaller file size -- thus my search for ways to do that.

When you say the "raster images are grossly oversampled" does this mean that the seven origianl photographs I have linked into the poster are too detailed for the purpose? I suppose I could edit them to be 300dpi at the size they will be printed at.

Again, thanks for your help.

Marc

[JETalmage]

...I am designing an 18" x 24" poster....

The first question for anything intended for print is: How will it be printed? (Offset sheetfed press? Offset web press? One-off large-format printer (glorified inkjet printer)?)

I suppose I could edit them to be 300dpi at the size they will be printed at.

The second question for anything intended for conventional halftone printing (as opposed to stochastic screening, commonly used in large-format inkjets) is: What halftone screen ruling will be used? That is what determines the appropriate PPI for your raster content.

If I were building the design shown, this is how I would do it. For discussion purposes, I'll assume sheetfed offset, conventional CMYK halftoning, 120 LPI:

1. Open each image in Photoshop, convert it to CMYK, perform any needed color-correction.

2. Open the large background image in Photoshop, at its full original resolution.

3. Crop (to a size including bleed) and resample the background image to 180 PPI (1.5 * the halftone ruling).

4. Import, crop, scale, position the smaller images on additional Photoshop Layers.

5. Individually sharpen each Layer appropriately.

6. Apply the drop shadows as Layer Styles in Photoshop.

7. Flatten the whole raster composition to a single Photoshop Layer. Save as TIFF.

8. Import the TIFF into Illustrator.

9. Add the vector elements (including holding lines of the small images, if any.)

10. Save the AI file. Also save as press-ready PDF, without AI editability.

11. Open the PDF in Acrobat Pro, check everything with the Preflight toolset. (Ex: in your example, one common error to check for is accidental overprinting of white text.)

The resulting file is as simple as can be. Vector objects are vector, as they should be. No automated "flattening" of raster effects will be required downstream, because there's only one raster image, and no live raster effects are applied in Illustrator. This is slightly more work than just willy-nilly application of live raster effects in Illustrator which many designers are prone to do nowadays; but it avoids any possibility of nasty surprises such as stitching artifacts that can wreck a print job.

JET

[Guest]

Two friendly amendments, both a matter of habit and choice more than correctness:

1. I do all Photoshop editing in RGB mode. Pixel clean-up, color- and luminance-correction, cropping, sharpening. There are more filters available in RGB mode, I find channel manipulations simpler, and I believe after over a decade working in the program that the post-corrections conversion to CMYK is infinitely more precise and faithful than years ago. After the conversion I'll deepen the black channel and be done with the images.

2. As the press-ready PDF job options will flatten your artwork, I'm not as fussy about placing a flattened image file in Illustrator as I used to be. The layered PSD image preserves last-minute change options. As for TIFF vs. PSD, while both are robust and reliable, I've not found any special advantages in the TIFF format nor any threats to health in the PSD format.

[JETalmage]

I do all Photoshop editing in RGB mode.

I don't follow any such global rule about in which mode to perform "all" editing.. There are color corrections possible in CMYK not possible in RGB and vice-versa. Same goes for LAB. But that opens a discussion beyond the scope of this thread.

JET

[loveblis]

Remove all affects: drop shadows, outer glows, etc. Flatten any art that has multiple layers.

Worked for me.

Typically, as previously noted, EPS files are primarily used by sign companies, large format printing. I don't use EPS files in any of my ad work. Tiffs, jpegs and an occasional PDF. Sometimes PNGs but those are mostly for the web stuff.