How to Considerably Reduce the Source EPS File Size in Illustrator? - Illustrator Tips

Adobe Illustrator Tutorial: How to Considerably Reduce the Source EPS File Size in Illustrator

Probably you have been searching for the answer to this question many times. Standard proposals as to this problem solving can provide your source file size reduction only by a few hundred kilobytes, and it is doubtful whether this would satisfy you. Today let me tell you how to make the source EPS file much smaller. The solution is very simple and original. Hope you find it interesting!

The EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) is considered to be a universal format for the vector and raster files saving, forwarding and exchanging. The said format shall be suitable for creation and opening by almost any graphic processing software (CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, IMSI TurboCAD, ACDSee Photo Manager, ACD Systems Canvas, QuarkXPress, Grasshopper PageStream, XnView, Apple Preview, etc.).

When saving our vector artworks in the universal EPS format, we are frequently faced with such challenge as too big size of these files. One of the key problems is the file size limit for the upload of EPS files on microstock sites.

Let us see how to reduce the size of such files. Let us take one of my vector artworks "Shades” as an example.

We save this vector file in EPS10 format.

We can see that the size of resulting source file is 23.6 Mb

In order to reduce the EPS file size it shall be enough to reduce the linear dimensions of our artwork. It can be done with the help of Selection Tool (V) or command Scale (Object > Transform > Scale)

After that, let us resave this vector file in EPS10 format. Now we see that the size of resulting source file is 4.93 Mb

Before I learned this trick, I used to be in doubt whether the source file would have the allowable size. Just for this reason some of my artworks have never been uploaded to the microstock sites, while some of them had to be edited with discard of the art elements, such as Textures, Opacity Masks etc. that increase the file size. But now I am sure that the size of any complex source file can be reduced.

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Total comments: 5

1 Petr Vaclaevk

Hmm, I have much more tips on reducing the EPS file size on my blog. Check this article: http://sellinggraphics.com/41/how-to-reduce-eps-file-size

2 jaroslav

Hi Petr, your tips are very useful. Thank you for the link.

3 Pradeep

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4 Farhood

What if I have for example, a collection of icons with fixed size which I don't want to be resized? Let's say, you created a set of 24x24px web icons. The exported ESP file size is over 4MG. Now you have to reduce the size to less than 2MG, how can you handle this?

5 jaroslav

You have to reduce number of points or number of steps in blend objects, for example. You can replace transparent objects using the Flatten transparency function etc.