Extracting plan images...

[Anonymous]

I am in the process of taking some of my design work and putting it together in a portfolio. What is the best way to save my chosen images in ArchiCAD to be used in other programs just as graphics. For example, when I save the plan as a jpeg, and bring it into Photoshop, I lose a lot of quality. In particular, the text becomes very fuzzy and unreadable. I also want to save the chosen image in a way so that all lines are black rather than color. Is this possible? Thanks....

[Anonymous]

You could try:

Printing to PDF then opening it in Photoshop - make sure you set your output to 300dpi or more so you can fiddle around with out loosing too much quality.

Exporting as a DWG - I think Illustrator can read DWGs, not sure how easy it is to edit them. can't remember though and no longer have access to Illustrator to find out. sorry. And I think Freehand can read DWGs as well. But again, can't remember. Years ago I used to import things from archicad into freehand, but I can't remember if it was dwg or eps. But what ever it was, it was editable, and good quality.

Saving as a tiff or a bitmap - they don't compress the same as a jpg (basically, jpgs are good for things with graduating colours, like photos and renders, gifs are good for block colours, like drawings, text etc.. and tifs, psd and bitmaps are better for both. but the file sizes are bigger.)

Save as a .psd - photoshop file.

When saving from a plan, zoom in and the quality of your saved image will be higher.

All a bit vague sorry, but hopefully some of it's usefull.

[Richard Morrison]

I think easiest is just to save directly from Archicad as .EMF. I just tried inserting an EMF version of a plan into a Word doc, and there was very little loss of quality.

[Anonymous]

Hi Britton

It happens that I have been looking into finding a good way to translate my plans generated in ArchiCAD into an image, where I can later on add colors etc. and turn it into a presentation kind of quality.

So far, I have been very happy with "printing" the plan as a PDF document, and then bringing it to PhotoShop to add the colors.

Shawn