Stone Texture

[jimmythegeek]

Forgive me if this is an easy question. I am fairly advanced in Photoshop, but a rookie at Illustrator. Here is my problem. I am working on a logo for a friend in which I need to make a stone block with two letters on the face of the front 2 sides. I was able to use the 3d filter in Illustrator to get the block the way I wanted and mapped the letters from a symbol I created.

I do not however know how to make a stone texture on the block. I created a stone texture in photoshop (no problem), brought it into Illustrator and created a symbol in which I mapped to the sides of the block. This looked ok until I resized it.

I could use Photoshop for the whole logo, but wanted to learn how to do this in Illustrator because, 1) I needed the practice, and 2) I was under the impression that a vector image can be resized to any dimension and maintain it's quality whereas rasterized cannot. She will need signs made as well as letterhead and web pages.

First, is Illustrator best for this? I can make the logo in Photoshop at very high ppi (like 600) in hopes that when you size it up it will maintain some of it's quality, but I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that Illustrator would be best.

Secondly, how do you create a stone texture to make the block look like a large stone cut? If this is not the place to answer that, could you direct me where I might find a tutorial (I have searched for stone texture tutorials all over the web for Illustrator with no luck).

Thirdly, what would happen if I created the image in Photoshop, then brought it into Illustrator and saved it as an image from there? would it make it vector? I would think not.

Thank you in advance for any input.

Jim Lunde
We all agree your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?

 

[carlow]

hi,

Well all things went ok till you placed the photoshop stone texture.

When you import pixels, they stay pixels. So resizing the log will give a inevitable, loss of quality. No way around.

Wait for CS 2 where you can vectorize an image and then scale it. Vectorizing has not the same quality (question of the pixels) as the orignal pixel image.

So there is no perfect workaround, it's trying and trying, and trying.

Sorry, I Have no other answers

carlow

 

[itchybug]

Jim:

Have you tried Effect>Texture? With the texturizer tool, you can apply images as textures to objects. You could choose a pre-made stone texture, or manufacture your own in PS, make sure it tiles properly, and use that (browse from the texturizer dialog box). Fiddle with scaling to make it fit on different size objects.

BTW I would manually produce the block rather than using the finnicky and inaccurate 3-d tools in CS.

Bert

Bert Philippus

http://www.itchybug.com

http://www.amenpackaging.com

 

[AShock]

My two cents...

If you have your steps recorded in an action in Photoshop, you might be able to work your way through them in Illustrator (you'll need to get creative...you can't simply import actions from Photoshop to Illustrator as far as I can tell)...you'll find some tools are not available...I can't find Noise, but Texturizer has about the same capabilities.

Then once you have the stone set, you can just save the settings as a Graphic Style in Illustrator and apply to anything as needed. Just make sure you save the new style in a Graphic Style Library to access it from other documents.

As far as which program is best for the job, with Illustrator all edges are always going to be sharp. You can increase the size of your image a ton and the edges will remain crisp...because it's vector based.

Hope this helps.

~A

A. Shock

http://www.PrepressTraining.com

 

[jimmythegeek]

Thank you all for you responses.

itchybug, You say you can apply images as textures to objects. If I use an image (which is raster), won't it stay raster?

How do you all do logos if you want to combine vector with raster look?

Jim Lunde
We all agree your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?

 

[itchybug]

Jim:

Yes it's raster, but you can make it high res and scale down for use in Illustrator. Also, if you use correct tiling, you could keep the image small and still have good resolution. Keep in mind, that when you apply a texture to a fill, you can make the edges of your object sharp by applying a stroke (make sure you apply the texture only to the fill).

Bert Philippus

http://www.itchybug.com

http://www.amenpackaging.com

 

[itchybug]

Oh, and don't forget to set the raster effects resolution equal to or higher than 300 dpi!

Bert Philippus

http://www.itchybug.com

http://www.amenpackaging.com