1. Importing PSDs into After Effects

In this tutorial we will cover the topic Exporting files from photoshop files to 3rd Party programs such as Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator after they are imported and treated in these programs (if needed) they are ready for there use in Flash or any 3D Package.

What we have here is a design that consist of 2 layers and 1 text layer. You may work with anything, but for this example let's keep it with more than 2 layers because our first overview will be importing into After Effects and I'm going to show you the method by importing .psd files and still being able to edit the layers inside. So once you are ready just save you file as exporting.psd and let's get ready to import into After Effects. Open up your After Effects and lets create a New Composition.

Once you place these values in your New After Effects document, let's continue onto our next process. Let's import our .psd file File > Import > Files ..

Once inside we need to import the .psd as a composition not a footage.

Once imported you will see that we have a folder on top of our .psd file in our After Effects project. Inside this folder we have our layers which are now converted to .psd files, they still work as layers. If you want to paste the whole .psd file in the Canvas, you just Drag and Drop the .psd file not each separate file in the canvas unless you are going to edit each layer by itself.

Now If you're going to import a .psd and wouldn't want to have the layers just repeat the same steps from above but instead of Composition use Footage and press ok. Shown Below.

Once you've done this you will be shown a Menu where you choose If you want the Layer merged or an specific layer from the .psd, Like shown below.

It's as simple as that!

2. Exporting from Photoshop to Illustrator

We are going to continue with our tutorial this time exporting paths from photoshop and import into Illustrator. We are going to stick to the same logo but we have a problem, these logo layers are filled, they are not paths. We are going to be working on a simple way to convert them to paths. So Let's re-open our exporting.psd file and go to our layers panel.

Now as we can see, we have 2 layers and 1 text layer, I personally would just import the objects into Illustrator because if we path the text layer we will have an ugly distorted font face, which can be done perfectly with Illustrator, So we are not going to import the text layer as paths - So let's highlight both of our block layers by Holding Down Control + Shift and Click on Each One, we will have them both selected as seen below.

Once you have them Selected we move into the Paths Palette and click on the "Make work path from selection" button, this does exactly what the name says.

Once you click on that button we will have our Rectangle's Path.

Once here we are almost done. Let's go to export the paths, File > Exports > Paths to Illustrator.

Save it and keep all the default settings it brings. Now we have our paths. Let's open up Illustrator and go directly to Open document and go ahead and open the Illustrator file we just saved. Once open you will see our figure inside with no text similar to below.

And there you have it, as simple as 123. You are able to export files to great 3rd Party tools. Remember this paths do not keep you stranded to Illustrator - You can also import or Open these paths in Any 3D Package and in any other vector based program.