Trouble exportig>opening file...

First off, hello everyone! This is my first post. Im an illustrator and photoshop newb going to school for industrial design, so Im trying to learn these programs as they will be a big part of my future!

Anyway, on to the question. I bought this photoshop magazine, and was trying to follow a tutorial for scanning in an image. (btw i have searched for this, and found nothing). So I scanned it and opened it in illustrator, and did live trace and everything to get the outline, then I exported it as psd (as the tut. said), but when I opened it in photoshop, the white background was gone. It was an outline of my drawing on the gray and white checkerboard background. Now in the tutorial it said to use the magic wand tool to select all the white, and delete it (in illustrator) so I thought maybe that was it, but it wasnt. It still opened like that without deleting the white areas. Any clue as to what im doing wrong?

What versions of illustrator and photoshop are you working with?

www.wiredviews.com

both cs3

Is there a fill on the object you are bringing into photoshop? Instead of exporting as a psd and opening in photoshop, you could open a new ps document. Then in illustrator copy your image and then paste it in your new photoshop image which when creating a new could have your white background. I don't know if this gets you to the same result as desired...