Illustrator hairlines when importing to Photoshop

Question

I know there's a million questions about the hairline bug in Illustrator. However, I couldn't find an answer to my specific problem so I'm asking for help.

I created a dumbbell with Illustrator and want to import it into a Photoshop document. At this point, the hairlines appear. They're not appearing in Illustrator since I have anti-aliasing turned off. I think the problem is having a PDF-compatible AI file (which is necessary for Photoshop). Is there a way to fix this?

I can't tell if the problem is the AI file itself, or just Photoshop. If it's a problem with the AI file, I'd like to fix that directly.

Answer 1

I tested it before writing the following. I recreated the dumbbell with the same shapes you had, the triangle, the rectangles and the rounded shape on the top left side where the problem happens.

The reason why you get hairlines in Photoshop when you open the PDF AI file is because your actual Adobe Illustrator dumbbell image has many SEPARATE shapes all stuck together. They might look ok in Illustrator, even when zooming above 1000%, but the solution I found is to make the shapes overlap onto each other to make sure there is not even a slight tiny gap in-between the shapes that you cannot visually see on your screen, but that Photoshop will show once imported. Also, as a double protection and to make your vector image "bullet proof" you should use the Pathfinder tool in Illustrator to unite all the shapes that are touching each other, before saving it.