Hi Emily! Would you be willing to respond to a few questions I have about vectorizing calligraphy for Letterpress? There are so many things I'm not sure about, because my letterpress printer takes my photoshop files and deals with the vectorization herself. I want to learn, and I'm trying to piece together an idea of what I can gain (besides € savings), if I learn Illustrator.
If there are any other Illustrator users on this board, please feel free to jump in, too! I would SUPER appreciate anybody shedding light on the subject for me.
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I'll start out with what I know: Vectors are not made up of pixels, and so a vector graphic can be made any size without changing image quality, and they don't look like they're made up of a bunch of little squares, the way they do when you open them in Photoshop. Yes?
That kind of brings me to question #1:
If a calligrapher scans in her lettering and opens it up in photoshop for clean-up and layout, won't she necessarily have a pixelated graphic once she opens it up in Illustrator? Is it possible to deal with clean-up and layout directly in Illustrator and skip the Photoshop? I would have thought so, but this isn't the way my Letterpress printer works, so I'm a bit confused...
Question #2:
(This one risks sounding critical but here's one that really has me scratching my head.)
I see a lot of Letterpress stuff out there on the Internet and I'm a bit confused about the wiggly, bumpy hairlines that make it all the way to print. It seems that some calligraphers who are strong in graphic design are able to smooth out their letterforms using Illustrator. I'm guessing this because when I look at the vectors which they have used to do their branding stuff (website headers, etc), I see very smooth forms. When I look at their lettering, I see shaky, wiggly hairlines and "imperfections". Is this something they're doing in Illustrator or Photoshop? (This isn't universal, of course. There are some calligraphers where everything they do, including headers and branding stuff, always show "imperfections".)
Question #3:
I don't have a particularly shaky hand myself, (anyway I try to use whole-arm movement and I put a lot of practice effort into steadiness), and "on principle" I wouldn't necessarily think of myself as a calligrapher if I regularly used "erase the shaky" software techniques
, BUT... Are we talking about a vast range of skill in Illustrator which gives out really different qualities of vectors? I kind of wonder why some calligraphers would make such shakey-quakey hairlines if there was something they could do about it using Illustrator. ?? Or a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator...
(((À propos of shaky vs. smooth and all that: Our dear Erica remains an inspiration to me, as her lettering is smooth and precise and doesn't look like it needs to have a thousand(s) dollar suite of software thrown at it to look good. It's my overall intention to have a smooth hand and not necessarily to fake everything in using PS and Illustrator, but I'm dying to know what their capabilities actually are!)))
Question #4:
I hear people talking about the "line tool" and about the bezier curves. Do these have something to do with each other? Does mastery of this stuff give designers the ability to produce smoother-looking letterforms? Whereas if all they do is the "trace" function, things come out wiggly? (I'm getting ahead of your answers and making guesses now. I'm not actually sure what "trace" does, I've only just heard of it.)
I'd ask my printer all this, but she's in another city and I'm not sure what she's doing to my stuff when she vectorizes it. I scan it at 1200 dpi and then send it directly to her without making it a PS doc these days. It comes back looking exactly like I wrote it, so I guess she's not doing any "smoothing" of anything.
MILLE MERCIS in advance if you have the time to answer some of my questions!