I am opening this topic so that I can understand how Illustrator CS and Photoshop CS interact.

First, lets lay some groundwork so that you can know where I am coming from. We are in the process of updating our agency to System X and CS Suite. In the past we were using Illustrator 8 and Illustrator 9 with Photoshop 6.0, and Photoshop 7.0. Also since I am more on the technical side rather than the creative side, I am unsure if Illustrator 8.0 could have a photoshop file placed in the illustration. If not then then the creatives were simply placing tiffs or EPS files rather than true Photoshop files.

This is the comparative basis that we are using when seeing what Illustrator CS and Photoshop CS do with the same procedure.

My guess is that Illustrator CS handles photoshop files differently than Illustrator 8 does. So what I am now trying to establish is what did Illustrator 8.0 do when a photoshop file was placed in an illustration and compare that to what Illustrator CS does when a Photoshop CS file is placed in an illustration.

Here is an example so you can get the idea of what I am dealing with here. The creatives here will mock up packaging in Photoshop and then place it in illustrator to do the composition work.

Now... recently the head of our packaging group came to me complaining about speed. I found out that he was placing a 90mb Photoshop file into Illustrator (Also I opened up the file and found that opened the file was close to 700 mb, and that there were about 30 layers.) The Illustrator file was taking about 7 minutes to fully open, with the spinning Pizza of Doom making its appearance during this time. After 7 to 10 minutes the file would open and the creatives could do their work.

Questions:

1) What actually happens when you place a photoshop file in Illustrator, what does Illustrator actually do with the file, does it rasterize every layer?

2) What can we do to make the process faster? Do we save and combine layers to separate files?

3) Have others out here run into these same problems and what are they doing to work with this type of stuff? Are they actively managing file sizes so not to overload the programs?

Thanks for the help.

John Gibson