- This chapter is all about placing photos
and other pixel-based artwork into an illustration.
Such images generally come from Photoshop,
but they can just as easily come directly
from a digital camera, a smartphone, Snapchat,
or a scrap of paper someone found
in a basement file cabinet.
When you place a photo, either by choosing the place command
or by dragging and dropping it from the desktop,
Illustrator creates a link to the image file
on your hard drive.
That way, if you edit the image with
Photoshop or some other program,
Illustrator updates the placed image automatically.
You can also alter the image inside Illustrator
to your heart's content, without risking any harm
to the original photograph.
In the following movies,
I'll show you how to adjust the placement
of a cropped image,
draw a border around it,
mask the image inside live editable type,
and preserve transparent pixels,
commonly associated with layers in Photoshop.
In short, I'll teach you everything you need to know
about working with photographic images inside Illustrator.