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About Archicad's documenting tools, views, model filtering, layouts, publishing, etc.

Photoshop & ESP

Anonymous
Not applicable
HI can anybody help me, i want to take the plans i have created on AC and edit them with photoshop to add shadows and textures etc, my friends use autocad to do this and i want to do it via AC, how do i transfer them and are they still to scale. I have read about eps files and i think i need to print it to this file type but i cant can somebody please help me.

thanks
mk
10 REPLIES 10
Anonymous
Not applicable
Hi there, can anybody help me, i want to edit AC plans with photoshop to add shadows and textures etc, how do i do this and is the final outcome to the original scale. my friends use autocad to do this and i have heard something about printing the plans to a eps file, i have tried to do this but i have no idea how as there is no option to save as an eps file.

hope someone can help,

mk
Anonymous
Not applicable
You can PUBLISH to an EPS file, at least in Plotmaker. That's where my knowledge stops, sorry.
Anonymous
Not applicable
MK,
Stuart is right.
In navigator drag the floor plan into publisher.
Change the file type to one that Photoshop can open
such as .jpg.
Publish the file into a folder (create a path).
Launch Photoshop, file-> open, find the folder, find the file, and "open".
Photoshop should be able to open the file and then you can edit it.
Peter Devlin
Anonymous
Not applicable
Peter wrote:
MK,
Stuart is right.
In navigator drag the floor plan into publisher.
Change the file type to one that Photoshop can open
such as .jpg.
- or Encapsulated PostScript File, better quality.
It depends on what file fomat the ArchiCAD drawing you want to to convert into a EPS file is. Are you talking about floor plans, renderings?

You can print ArchiCAD drawings as .pdf, save as .eps in Acrobat, open in Photoshop as EPS file, however you will lose picture quality big time. Photoshop will rastorize all of the vector data when they are opened as .eps file.

You can save your ArchiCAD rendeings as Photoshop .psd. Will that help?

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Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
mk,

Please do not post the same question more than one time in more than one forum. 😉

The copy of this question in Construction Documentation is a more appropriate place for responses (although Presentation - Rendering and Multimedia would also have been OK).

Folks... if you intend to add to this thread, please go here (the duplicate) instead:
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=48886#48886

Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier   •   macOS Sonoma 14.7.1, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Actually, you can just open a PDF file directly in Photoshop. Open it at a pixels/inch that will allow you to print the raster image at that density to achieve a to-scale result.

(When you open a PDF of a plan in Photoshop, the vector linework is rasterized according to the pixel size you specify.)

Note too ... if you have Adobe Illustrator and open a PDF of a plan, section, etc. ... all of the vector linework opens as Illustrator linework in case that is of any use.

Also ... you can open 2D plans in Piranesi and bucket fill with colors or textures, etc.

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier   •   macOS Sonoma 14.7.1, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Anonymous
Not applicable
hi thanks for the info, two question though, 1 will the pdf file be to the original scale in photoshop and 2 if i want to create a larger sheet with numerous plans etc on it, can i just drag the edited plans onto the sheet.
thanks
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
mk wrote:
hi thanks for the info, two question though, 1 will the pdf file be to the original scale in photoshop and 2 if i want to create a larger sheet with numerous plans etc on it, can i just drag the edited plans onto the sheet.
thanks
Well, Photoshop needs ESP to figure that out. Otherwise, that is what I was saying about you having to specify the proper pixel values.

I don't know metric dpi values, so forgive the Imperial units here.

Suppose you have a sheet that is 24" x 36" and your create a PDF for that sheet and want to bring it into PS and print to scale. First, you have to decide what your dpi will be for printing in the end of it all. Let's assume 300 dpi (since 600 dpi would give an unmanageably large image file and 150 dpi would probably be too jaggy.) If you want the modified image to print at 100% of the original PDF scale, and have decided that you will be printing at 300 dpi, then you need to open the PDF as 24 x 300 and 36 x 300 pixels = 7200 x 10800 pixels (assuming a full 24 x 36 inch sheet with no margin reduction for the PDF).

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier   •   macOS Sonoma 14.7.1, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB