As an image manipulation program,  Adobe® Photoshop®™ is understandably popular with designers. However, tasks more specific to the decorative printing industry such as repeating, colour separation and colourway creation with accurate colour output can be achieved far more accurately and productively working with a specialist application such as AVA. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that many users choose to combine the best of both worlds – beginning the design process in Photoshop®™ before bringing the design into AVA to prepare it for production, be it digital or conventional.

Opening PSD layered files into AVA

Like AVA, Photoshop®™ has it’s own file format, meaning it can save native data within a document which is unique to the software. When you open these files into AVA, you have to choose how this data is handled, and this is done via the File Format Settings .

Open which layers from file

• All - will import all of the layers as previous versions of AVA would do
• Data Layers - will give all of the layers except the flattened image layer
• Flattened Image - will only give the flattened image layer
• Ask Each Time - will present a dialog to the user every time they open a PSD file and is the default setting

Ignore Non AVA Compatible Layers

This will only bring in the layers that AVA understands and will discard anything else. The dialog that appears on opening provides the same options as those in Settings , as well as a ‘Don’t Ask Again’ check box. This will save those settings to the user Settings .

Unsupported layer types such as layer groups, effect and adjustment layers will import as an ‘Unsupported Layer Type’ with a warning icon to indicate that AVA does not understand them.