Help! Exporting spot color channels as paths with fill to Illustrator

Ok. Here is my dilema. I need to send vectorized art to this company that only uses Illustrator. I have never used or even opened Illustrator. Ok, I'm very familiar with Freehand so I get the basic idea about vector. I have a 3 color logo that I have saved as a Photoshop DCS .eps file with the channels saved as spot colors so I can print separations with Pantone colors. According to what I have translated from the Photoshop guide what I need to do is figure out how to get my clipping paths of each channel to retain its fill when I export paths to Illustrator. I've tried and when I open the vectorized paths in say Freehand there is only lines and no fills. Do you guys have any ideas on how I can get these file seperations to this company with Illustrator? It really seems like it shouldn't be this hard!

You have 2 options....

First check if you can save you work in the Illustrstor Format (.ai), im not sure if you have this options... and you may have to do a few change before...

If the above does not work, save the image as en .eps (Encapsualated Post Script) its the best formrat for vector art (it will remain as vector).

Hoipe this help you...

Actually, using the DCS format for spot-colors from Photoshop is correct. The problem is that page-layout programs need to be told explicitly how to handle spot-colors.

the solution is to make sure to name the colors the same in Photoshop, as the page layout app would name them.

Ex. Photoshop may call a color Pantone Pantone 442C, whereas Freehand (and possibly Quark and others) call it Pantone 442CVC.

Find out (in advance) what naming scheme the Page layout program uses, rename the Photoshop colors accordingly, export as DCS and you should be good to go.

One thought...I don't know if Illustrator can even do it at all (import spot colors from PS) since it's not really a "page layout" program;) Gotta check specs on that one. (I use Freehand so I'm not familiar with how Illustrator handles it)

good luck.

Have you tried creating a logo in Freehand, saving it as an eps and opening it in illustrator? Actually I think you can save it as an illustrator file. IMO doing logos in a vector program is easier and more convienent when sending it to print.