How do I make a transparent background in Illustrator?

[diverdown]

I am trying to make a collage of characters for my cpo. They are all bmps so I am vectorizing them (slowly).  When I finish touching up the images in photoshop against a transparent background i select only the character and copy/paste it into illustrator. When I paste it I get a white background that is not transparent. If i trace the image and then cop/past it onto my cpo I get the white square background as well. This makes it impossible to overlap images.

How do I select the character only?
How do I set document background to transparent?

I have set as transparent in document setup but it doesnt appear transparent.



Any help would be great


Diverdown

[Harakiri]

You can export illustrator information directly to photoshop as is but if you're willing to export content from photoshop to illustrator with transparency you either have to save it in GIF or PNG format.

If you're exporting images from photoshop to illustrator i sugest you export in PNG-24 format because is far more suitable than GIF.

I think there's a "preserve transparency" option somewhere that needs to be checked before exporting so please take notice.

I hope this helps.


Merry Xmas to you and the rest of the users in this forum!

[diverdown]

Ta muchly. I will take a look

[Mista-FraggadeliX]

Depending on your version of Illustrator you can just place .psd files in Illustrator (native photoshop document: supports layers and transparancy).

But maybe you're going about this the wrong way... You might be better of placing the bitmaps in Illustrator and vectorising them there. Illustrator has much more powerfull and flexible tools for vector-art. (as one might expect from a $500 vector package  )

You could also check out the official adobe userforums (no need to register if you only browse or search the forum)

www.adobeforums.com

[diverdown]

sorry i was probably confused above....  the bmps were placed in illustrator and then vectorised there....... then because i didnt know how to make their backgrounds transparent there i exported them to photoshop for manipulation