Imported EPS not transparent

[marcus]

I'm importing an EPS from Photoshop that has transparent areas (alpha
channel), yet when I "File->Import" into Freehand MX the image appears with
a solid, white area in the place of where it should be transparent. Do I
have to go through and make a pain-in-the-neck clipping path even when the
eps has transparent areas defined?

Any tips, ideas, comments are welcome. Peace!

[Danny Whitehead]

marcus wrote:

> Do I have to go through and make a pain-in-the-neck clipping path even when the
> eps has transparent areas defined?

Yes, for two reasons:

1. The Photoshop EPS format doesn't support alpha channel masks. Your
image will be flattenned on saving in this format. You could use TIFF,
but...

2. The use of alpha channel masks in FHMX is one of its 'raster
effects'. These are all calculated in RGB, so they're pretty useless for
print work. Any CMYK images and underlying objects affected by raster
effects will be converted to RGB using Freehand's colour management
settings, and back to CMYK at print time, so you'll lose all your
carefully-specified CMYK values.

This is very unfortunate. The abilty to use alpha channel masks was one
of the most exiting new features of FHMX, so I was very disappointed
when I discovered it had been rendered useless to me, a print designer
who spends a lot of time drawing clipping paths.


--


Danny

[Martin Sammtleben]

As far as I know 8-bit alpha transparency needs to be supported by the
PostScript language to be useful for print output, which is not the case. As
long as the situation doesn't change there's little the FH engineers can do
about it.

The same used to be true for the lens effects: looked great on screen but you
could get nasty surprises when run on film.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong ;-)

Cheers Martin

[Danny Whitehead]

Martin Sammtleben wrote:

> As far as I know 8-bit alpha transparency needs to be supported by the
> PostScript language to be useful for print output, which is not the case.As
> long as the situation doesn't change there's little the FH engineers can do
> about it.

Maybe they could develop a decent flattening system, that isn't reliant
on a single, easily-missed setting that applies to both display and
print, and doesn't hose all your CMYK colours going through an archaic
colour management system. You know, like the ones in the applications MM
were trying to catch up with when they added all these raster effects.

--


Danny