The Difference Between Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator | Cleveland Institute of Art
The Difference Between Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator
08/31/17 | Posted by LeAnn Troutner | Posted in Digital Creativity
Two fabulous programs utilized strongly by artists is Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. These two programs have a lot in common but their differences are bigger than their similarities. Photoshop is based on pixels while Illustrator works using vectors.
Photoshop is raster-based and uses pixels to create images. Photoshop is designed for editing and creating photos or raster-based art. When the program was developed it was for photographers, but over time the program has grown to help all kinds of artists to do many different kinds of work. Now Photoshop is known to create interface designs, web pages, banner ads, video graphics, and the original use of editing and creating images for print.
Photoshop is known to be able to do so much and be so easy to learn that it is looked at as a one stop shop, but Photoshop is not the best program for all types of artwork and design.
Illustrator works off vectors, these are points used to create perfectly smooth lines. This program is for creating and editing vector-based work such as graphics, logos, and other design elements. Vectors are scalable images that can be sized as small or as large are you need them to be, but look the same when it comes to clarity and resolution.
Illustrator is not ideal for creating multi-page documents and using the program this way would create some drawbacks. Illustrator doesn’t have a way to setup master pages the way that InDesign does. This is a necessary tool when you’re building documents that use templates. Illustrator also doesn’t allow you to automate page numbers. This is another feature InDesign supports, which can be especially useful when dealing with larger documents.
Photoshop is a bad program to use when creating logos, it will do nothing but cost you time and money. Creating a logo in Photoshop cannot be enlarged or manipulated in the same manner that an Illustrator based logo can. Type will print clearest at vector-based rendering. The Adobe Creative Cloud Package has many different programs to create different art in separate practices.
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What's the Difference Between Photoshop and Illustrator?
Updated 10/9/2019
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator are two of Adobe's massively popular graphics programs. If you're working on a new project, you might have a hard time figuring out which of the two programs will work best for you, since on the surface they seem so similar.
We've compiled some of the main differences between Illustrator vs. Photoshop to help you get started.
What Is Adobe Illustrator?
Adobe Illustrator is an advanced, vector-based editing software used to create logos, graphics, cartoons, and fonts. Unlike Photoshop, which uses a pixel-based format, Illustrator uses mathematical constructs to create vector graphics. What’s a vector in Illustrator? It’s a line that’s composed of two dots connected by a computer algorithm, instead of just a line of pixels. Because of vectors, Illustrator is used often to create logos or anything that may need to be printed or displayed at different sizes.
Pros of Adobe Illustrator Software:
A vector graphic will never lost its quality if it's scaled up or down
Illustrator will also give you a better print output since it's not resolution-dependent
Cons of Adobe Illustrator Software:
It can't be used easily to modify images that are already created, since there are limited filters and image editing tools available to you.
How well do you know Illustrator?
What Is Adobe Photoshop?
Adobe Photoshop is a great program for modifying already-created images or graphics—like photos—and is Adobe's most popular program. Editing photos is awesome in Photoshop, because it includes a lot of unique filters, special effects, and tools.
Pros of Adobe Photoshop software:
Photoshop is also a popular choice for web graphics, photo editing and designs since those projects will stay at a fixed size
Another great benefit of Photoshop is that you can have complete control of your projects, since you can edit your graphic pixel-by-pixel
Cons of Adobe Photoshop software:
Raster or bitmap graphics are created in Photoshop and these graphics can sometimes look a little jagged since raster images are made up of individual colored squares, known as pixels. Everything in Photoshop is just a series of pixels, so if you're scaling something up or down, it can lose its quality very quickly.
How well do you know Photoshop?
What about Fireworks and InDesign?
Now that you know the difference between Photoshop and Illustrator, there are a couple other Adobe graphics software packages you probably have wondered about, like Fireworks and InDesign.
Fireworks works well with Flash and Dreamweaver. Fireworks offers both raster and vector options, but doesn't excel at either.
InDesign works best when it comes to making multi-page layouts with a lot of written content, like magazines or books. It's still best to stick with Photoshop and Illustrator to create graphics and then send them over to InDesign if you're working on a book or PDF, since you'll have more options and control over your creations. But don't worry, InDesign will preserve the vector images you created in Illustrator.
Using Photoshop and Illustrator Together
You'll come to find that some people just prefer to use one software over another, but sometimes it's best to use Photoshop and Illustrator together. For example, you may need to add some text to an image you need to edit. Maybe you need to add a watermark to a photo for your blog or over an image for your portfolio. It's best not to add any text to an image in Photoshop since it can distort, so transferring the edited photo to Illustrator and then adding the text there will give you the best result.
One program is definitely not better than the other, they're just different. Understanding Photoshop vs. Illustrator will help you make the decision about which software is best for your next project.
Interested in learning more? Browse Pluralsight’s resources or sign up for a course today!
What is The Difference Between Photoshop vs Illustrator
Now that we already know the main differences between illustrator and photoshop, let’s see some cases when to use illustrator is the best choice for you.
If you need to create a design from zero and don’t need to edit already existing images, you need to use illustrator as the tools that this software have for that are better than photoshop, one of this tools only present in adobe illustrator is the ability to work simultaneously in multiple artboards in the same project, that tool is very useful for logo design projects as you can play with different variations of the logo or try different color schemes.
The main difference between illustrator vs photoshop is the ability to design using vector graphics is also one of the focal points on choosing illustrator, for example, if you need to design graphic elements that need to be scalable and showed in a multitude of sizes is better to design a logo in illustrator versus photoshop.
Another great tool in abode illustrator is the ability to modify typefaces and any kind of text converting them into shapes, that quality let you edit the text as you imagine, stretching, transforming or adjusting the anchors. Illustrator has really powerful tools for typography design and if that will be your main focus then you then need to choose adobe illustrator versus photoshop.
Illustrator best for design projects like:
