From the course: Illustrator: Seeing Through Transparency

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Understanding transparency flattening

Understanding transparency flattening - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator: Seeing Through Transparency

Understanding transparency flattening

Up until this point we've explored some pretty cool features inside of Illustrator that allow us to take advantage of transparency. However, what happens when we try to print these documents? As we spoke about way back in Chapter 1 of this course, we know that PostScript, which is what drives most of the printers in our market, does not understand the concept of transparency, yet inside of Illustrator, because Illustrator's file format is based on PDF, we can create transparency as we've seen till this point. So in order for us to make our documents compatible and be able to print on PostScript devices, they need to go through a process called transparency flattening. Now you may be familiar with the term flattening from Photoshop where maybe you have several layers and you flatten all those layers now into a single layer. Now in regards to transparency here inside of Illustrator, it's not exactly the same concept. Flattening transparency really has a different meaning and in this…

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