Exporting for Print

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at exporting our Illustrator files. Getting it ready for print or maybe digital distribution. So, maybe looking at emailing it as a PDF, or for having it downloaded from a website. I'm going to wrap that up into this course. Especially, Web Export, we'll look in the next video. So jump to that one if you want to. All right, let's get started.

You can have any document open, but in your 'Exercise Files', I've got 'Exporting Print' open. There's two things we need to quickly check before we create our PDF, which is going to be our, probably, most useful exporting file from it. Now we need to check both the color mode and the raster settings. Basically color mode is RGB versus CMYK. We went through this in proper detail in an earlier video, so check that one out but let's say I'm going to a local print shop. One on the corner, and they're going to run me off, a 100 copies, or 1000 copies. It's best to send them in RGB. So we'll be working from the beginning in RGB. You can switch it later on here, but RGB is going to give you a better result. Just does from those kind of smaller print shops. Now if you're working in a big kind of offset printing, they typically call it. So it's a big printing, they're going to print you 10,000. They're probably going to want CMYK. Have a look at that video earlier on, but this is where you can go change it.

The next thing to double check is under 'Effects', 'Document Raster Settings'. In previous tutorials I said, lower the resolution in here because it makes sure the computer runs a whole lot faster while you're working. The cool thing about it being in Illustrator is you can yank it back, up to 300. Like super high quality. Doesn't matter that your machine's going to run little slowly now with the final hurdle. So just make sure it's up at 300, click 'OK'. Then we're going to 'File', 'Save As'.

So in here, what we need to do, is I'm going to put it on my 'Desktop'. I'm going to put it in 'Illustrator Files'. Down here where it says 'Format', I'm going to lift it up. We're going to use 'Adobe PDF'. Let's click 'Save'. There's basically two things you need to do. You need to drop this down, and say I'd like to use high quality print. That's just a really good default. You're not going to run into problems with that one. The other thing is to turn this off. This on, basically means that the PDF you're making is basically a full working Illustrator file. We don't need that to go to the printer. We've got an Illustrator file already.

The biggest problem with it is that the file size can become huge with this left on. So if you do find, yours is a really big file sizes, PDFs, and you're like, "Typically these should be smaller," it's because this has been left on. It will say, this preset up here has been modified. It's because we unticked this. Then we just click on 'Save PDF'. It warns you, "You've turned that thing off." Don't worry, it's okay. You wait for the PDF to be produced. Hopefully now, on my Desktop, in my files, there's this Print file, it's quite small. It is half a Megabyte. And yes, that one is ready to go to print. And because it's RGB, that one there can be downloaded from the net as well. So my file size is really small.

If your documents are lot bigger and you do need it to be smaller, for a website, or an email you can do some slight adjustments. Let's do another 'Save As'. I'm going to call this one 'Low Res'. So it's going to be smaller. It's not going to look bad but what we're going to do is, go into, you can start with High Quality. That's for Print, but we can go to this one called 'Smallest' quality. Sorry, 'Smallest File Size'. That's going to be a good one for Web. And that's all you need to do.

This one by default, has that turned off. And we're ready to go. This one's probably not going to be much more, much smaller because it is just really smaller to start with. Let's have a little look. Our Low Res one. Significantly smaller. It's about a quarter of the size. That's a whole lot more important when you've got a file that's maybe, say 20MB. A quarter of the size would be awesome. So those, have to go to a commercial printer. This one have to go to, maybe a website version, or an email version.

One last thing you might do is, say you're not exporting for-- I'm going to close that down. I'm going to open up my original 'ai' file. What we want to do is, say we want to send this off to somebody else to work on. You can do-- or you've got a colleague, and they want to work on the Illustrator file. Or you want to archive this. You can do, you can go to 'File', and something called 'Package'.

Package, what it's going to do, is it's going to copy any links. So any images that you've linked in here, it's going to copy any fonts used except for TypeKit, they protect those ones. Let's say you're using your company fonts, you need to send it to someone, they don’t have the font. It's going to be go in there. Where am I going to stick it? I'm going to stick it on my 'Desktop'. I'm going to stick it in my 'Illustrator Class Files'. That will be good. It's going to go into this folder. You may go and call it 'Folder'. Yes, why not. Click 'Package'. It says, "Be careful, fonts are going to be copied in here." "Make sure, by law you're allowed to use them." "Yes, sir." I'm going to click 'OK'. It's done. Let's have a look in our folder.

It's created this folder, and the cool thing about it is that it's put in my ai file. Any fonts that have been used in it. Gowdy Old Style. And any links, there's my 'Desk' image. The cool thing about that is, I can now zip that up, say 'Compress'. If you're on a PC, you right click, and say 'Send to zip', and you get a zip file. I can email it to someone, or back it up, or put it on a disk. It's just a good way of making sure, I sent the ai file, but also close the images, also I'm closing the fonts. So it's ready to go.

All right, that is exporting from Adobe Illustrator to PDF. Let's get into the next one where we look at more Web based exports. All right, see you over there.