Convert PSD to transparent SVG (for ebooks)?
Psymon23 Sep 19, 2014 9:09 AMHi folks!
I've been working on an ebook, in which I wanted to insert a couple of pages of sheet music that I'd scanned, and I split the music up into individual measures (i.e. "lines of music", if you're not familiar with music terminology) to make separate graphics from. On the MobileReads forum (for epublishers, etc.), it was suggested that the best way to go for something like this would be SVG format (as opposed to JPEG or PNG or GIF), but I've been having a heck of a time trying to get things to come out right. I'm using Photoshop/Illustrator CS6, by the way (and have the full Design Studio).
There are a couple of issues that I've been struggling with...
Firstly, for the life of me I can't seem to get my transparent PSD to come out as a transparent SVG -- indeed, I can't even get the PSD to retain it's transparency (not that I can "see", anyway) even just in opening it in Illustrator, never mind when I "save as" as an SVG. Although my original PSD is essentially a raster file (i.e. one layer of my scanned sheet music, with another layer of text), I did manage to figure out how to use the "Image Trace" function to convert it to vector (I used the "16 Colors" option), and then "saved as" SVG, but no matter what I try I just can't get it to be transparent (i.e. the sheet music and the text, but with no background)!
Secondly, the file sizes seem inordinately high. If I create a simple PNG from my image (which I have no problem making transparent), it comes out as a mere 18k, but saving as SVG makes it almost 20x the file size, coming in at a whopping 325k! I've looked at all of the options in the "save as" (SVG) dialog box, but most of it is all meaningless to me -- surely there must be a way to keep the file size down to a minimum?
Lastly, in searching all over the web for an answer to this, I saw reference to doing a "Save for Web and Devices" option, where supposedly SVG is one of the formats that one can choose in there -- neither in Photoshop nor in Illustrator do I have that, though, I only have "Save for Web", and SVG isn't an option in there. Did "Save for Web and Devices" only come out after CS6?
Thanks so much for any suggestions on this -- I'd be happy to load up my original PSD file (and/or the resulting SVG/PNG versions that I ended up with) if that would help. I gather I just click on the "Insert Image" icon to do that?ain,
Thanks again, in advance!




