If you work in a production environment or work a lot with other artist I’m sure you’ve run into issues with embedded raster images before. Many times a customer or fellow artist will place a raster image (TIFF, JPG, etc.) into an Illustrator document using Illustrator’s Place command and transform it in some way. They might rotate it, scale it, skew it, or flip it, and all you need is the image in its original unaltered state so you can make some adjustments in Photoshop. This little AppleScript can take the embedded file and un-transform it back to its original size so that you can do what ever you need to with it.

Step 1: Open up an Illustrator file that contains an embedded raster image that you would like to un-transform. Note that you must select the raster image before running the AppleScript. The first screenshot below has the original unaltered placed TIFF image at bottom left and the altered (scaled and rotated) embedded TIFF image at top right.

Step 1

If you pull up Illustrator’s Link palette you can see every linked file within the current document. If the file is embedded you will see the square icon beside its name.

Illustrator's Link Palette

Step 2: Load up the AppleScript in Script Editor and click the “Run” button. You can download the script and example file by following the link at the bottom of this post.

Step 2

Step 3: After running the AppleScript your altered image should be back to normal (almost).

Step 3

Step 4: With the fixed image selected make sure to reset the bounding box by clicking Object > Transform > Reset Bounding Box. You can now copy the image to Photoshop and make the necessary adjustments.

Step 4

Done: Download sample file(s).