Confused about a placed object? 1

They are not transparent in AI. place an object behind the image to see what I mean. Are you sure their are no extra alpha channels in the .tifs?

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -Einstein

That's how i figured out they were clear. I placed them in a file on a blue surface. completely transparent. Now I am not super savey with the channels & dont really understand how to use an "Alpha channel" to my advantage, but I hit the channels pallette just one channel. The image is a bitmap mode image. Also, in the Paths tab there is nothing. I find this pretty strange, maybe something I don't know about bitmaps?

[j]

With bitmap mode, each pixel is either on or off - no shades of gray here. How that's interpreted depends on the application. In Illustrator (v10 anyway), the 'off' pixels are treated as transparent, while the rest take on the foreground color (black by default, but you can change this). In Photoshop, it's black & white. There's nothing special about the file, it's just the way it's being handled.

By the way, to get Illustrator to display it more like Photoshop, just go to Object > Flatten Transparancy. Not sure why you'd want to do this, but...

Wonderful blueark, with that said let me ask you this....
When placing these objects into AI using these bitmap images; how will it print? With white backgrounds or as it previews which is transparent.

[j]

thanks for your knowledge.

It should print as you see it. Sometimes transparency can be risky, depending on who's printing it. However, bitmap mode is so simple it rarely causes problems. A pixel is either on or off, so there's no semi-transparent regions to worry about. Even saving it as version 6 works!

Very interesting blueark. Thank you for your infinite bitmap wisdom! I created a bitmap image yesterday, placed it into AI. Exact same results.

[j]

It has to be a .tif in order for the white pixels to be translated at transparent. You can also change the fill color of the black pixels.

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -Einstein

That's good to know. Speaking of changing fill colors...i have another question to post. AI 10....wow new key commands all over the place, having so much fun being lost again. Any how filling objects with color when they are grouped or just mass selected. Can't do it. I will post the question.

Thanks for all the advise.

[j]

Sounds like the Appearance 'feature'. Why Adobe though it would be a good idea to set the defaults like that I'll never know, but anyway, I'll try to explain.

By default, the eyedropper picks up every detail from an object, not just the color. Some item in your group was probably colored this way and is throwing everything else off. If you select your group, then look at the Appearance palette (Window > Appearance), you'll probably see something like:

Stroke
Contents
Fill
Default Transparency.

A short term solution to your problem is to click & drag the word 'Contents' to below the word 'Fill'.

However, I normally disable this feature altogether by double-clicking the eyedropper and deselected Appearance. It's possibly not an ideal solution, but I've yet to find a disadvantage to it.

Ok. I decided to disable the appearence and I just dropped the menu by double clk the eyedropper. then unchecking all the features i guess under the appearence area. when I collapse the window it rechecks the appearance main box. But it appeared to work thanx! sorry this whole program suddenly went counter intuitive.

[j]