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Opening and placing artwork


    You can use the Clipboard and drag-and-drop importing to bring images into Illustrator. (See Moving, copying, and deleting objects.) However, two commands are most commonly used when importing artwork created by other applications:

    • The Open command opens a file created by another application as a new Adobe Illustrator file.
    • The Place command places an image in an existing Illustrator file in one of two ways. Depending on the file format, the Place command creates a link to an external file by default and does not include a copy of the file in the Illustrator file. You can also deselect the Link option in the Place dialog box, which embeds (includes) a copy of the file in the Illustrator file.

    Your document's color mode (CMYK or RGB) does not change when you place a file that uses a different color mode. Colors in the imported file convert to the document's color mode when you export or print the file.

    Note: Adobe Illustrator does not color-manage imported grayscale images. If you import a grayscale image that had a color profile in Adobe Photoshop, for example, the profile is discarded when the image is imported into Illustrator.

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