Bitmapped Tiffs in Illustrator

[exxxlonghair]

I recently noticed an issue with bitmapped .tiff files in Illustrator. I scanned black and white lineart at 1200 dpi greyscale in photoshop- thresholded, converted to bitmapp and saved as a .tiff. The files looks great in Photoshop, but when viewing in Illustrator it looks all pixelated.

The weird thing is that they both seem to print great. I think I notice a tiny loss of detail in the file printed from Illustrator but not much. I never noticed this issue on older versions of Illustrator before, now I am on CS5 . I figured it was some sort of screen preview issue but haven't been able to figure it out. Anyone have any ideas.

[lil_tuffy]

It's because you are looking at a raster image in a vector program. If you live trace the bmp it will look fine.

[kylewbaker]

You're both right. Don't bother live tracing though. You can adjust the quality of the image preview but it still won't look identical unless you have it on pixel preview (and even then I find it ain't always quite the same).

Printing quality shouldn't be different except insofar as the settings differ.

[exxxlonghair]

Thanks guys, I was staring at that shit for so long I finally gave up. I was thinking about what Tuffy said but I just don't remember this happening in the older versions of Illustrator. I guess I'll give the pixel preview a try and see if that makes any difference. I just don't want to send something to a printer and have it come out jacked.

[clockworkpictures]

I always use bitmap tiffs for my designs: if you are sure of your output from photoshop, you can forget how they look in illustrator, yu'll end up fine.

[peter worth]

Look at it in Preview or Acrobat... It should look the way you want it to.

[B-DROID]

Look at it in Preview or Acrobat... It should look the way you want it to.

Yup.

[krayola]

Illustrator only shows a not so super detailed preview of the actual bitmapped image. Very much like Pagemaker used a low quality bmp thumbnail linked to the real file to save memory. And 300 dpi is all it takes to convert an image in Illustrator to have no jaggies.

[JustinHelton]

AI has Overprint and Pixel view options...look at it in pixel view and you will get a better idea of how it will look when printed.

[RichieGoodtimes]

Who the fuck cares as long as it outputs correctly?