AutoCAD to Photoshop

[J E Smith]

I need to export my CAD drawings into Photoshop for colouring, I have done this before with R14 & PS5.5 but now have LT2004 & PS7.0 and cant export properly. Any ideas or am I better off using Illustrator ?

[Phosphor]

I have an engineer friend that has been using AutoCAD since it first came out. He tells me that the latest versions make much more extensive use of plugin architecture. Since I'm not an engineer, I'm not up on the applications and version histories, thus, I don't know what "LT2004" is. Having said that, I can assure you that Photoshop 7 is NOT where you need to look for a solution to your problem.

Perhaps the CAD app version you're working on now doesn't have a plugin for exporting as TIFF or EPS? Have you explored these options in the CAD application thoroughly?

If it's a given that you can, indeed, export from your CAD application as either a TIFF or an EPS, it's impossible for anyone to council you on which application you should use for coloring the files objects, since we don't know what sort of look you're going for in the final image.

[Mark Hiers]

AudoCad LT may be crippled to the extent that it won't export to a eps or tiff like the full version can, so check the AutoCad documentation.

[barry gray]

You could open in Illy then resave for PS.

[r_harvey]

I need to export my CAD drawings into Photoshop for colouring,




If you're adding trees and textures, there are applications designed for that--I believe there are ways to do that within AutoCAD.

You could open in Illy then resave for PS.




Or you could color the image in Illustrator.

Search the Illustrator forum; many issues have been explored there numerous times. As of today, there are 85 matches.

There are lots of problems opening AutoCAD files. Graceful curves become choppy little splines, data is randomly split between layers, some text is actually lines. The biggest issue is scale, since your carefully-designed shapes are reduced to postage stamp size--which you can scale.

[brett arrowood]

James,

Depending on what you are really trying to do, Illustrator is the way to
go. I just answered a question about bringing Autocad files into
Illustrator in the AI forum. I addressed the scale issue in that thread.

If you have elements on different layers in Acad, then you can select
those layers individually and change their color and stroke, etc.

Brett