Silly Question of Which Program to Use

I'm new to the full feature set for PhotoShop and I'm confused on an issue
of what program to use for a give task. Prior to getting CS Premium, I used
PSE to enhance and correct my digital still photos. With PSCS, I am getting
much further along with my photo enhancement skills.

I see a lot of posts dealing with using PS as a primary tool to create
graphics. In my Creative Suite learning, I see Illustrator being suggested
as the tool of choice for that type of work. I say suggested because
obviously PS is quite capable of doing the job. I'm not one to argue with
success: if you create a successful end product, it really does not matter
what tool you used to create it.

Therein lies my confusion. If I'm creating, for the sake of an example, a
graphic that will be used as part of a slide show (Power Point or similar),
which is the preferred tool: Illustrator or PhotoShop? The same question
again for designing a logo or other piece of decorative art (not wall hung
picture)?

Or is the real answer the amount of experience with one program over
another?

Hopefully I don't touch any sensitive spots here, this is just a confusing
point for me.

 

Illustrator is a vector application.
Photoshop is a raster application

Your question is a little like
"I'm hungry, should I eat an apple or an orange?"
The answer is... it depends on what you need.

Most serious illustrators make fruit salad-- and use
both or either-- (they have very different feature sets
and very different outputs)-- as appropriate to the job at hand.

Suggest you find a copy of
---Photoshop, Painter, and Illustrator Side-by-Side (Crumpler)
---Bert Monroy: Photorealistic Techniques with Photoshop & Illustrator
---4x4 Photoshop and Illustrator: Light/Dark (Friends of Ed)
or some such book to get a handle on the strengths and uses of each

 

Roughly: Photoshop = Pixels, Illustrator = Vectors
What you have to take in consideration is your output.You can create your
graphic in both for your show but you are stuck with the original size it
you use PS
When it comes to the creative part of the process what tool you use is your
problem, I have seen someone "paint" with a metal grinder and this someone's
art was beautiful
Some people use $600 software plus plug-ins to produce 0.2 cents art work
and others produce real art with a crayon or a throw away camera


Stephan

 

The difference is that Photoshop is mainly a raster (pixel based)
program and Illustrator is mainly a vector program, though there is some
overlap on both sides. Photoshop graphics are resolution dependent where
Illustrator graphics are not (meaning they can be any size without
losing detail)

Often an artist will use both in the creation of a single piece.

Either one depending on what the graphic is and where it's being used.
If it's mainly photographic or "painted" Photoshop is the choice. If
it's clean, smooth, diagrammatic Illustrator might be your best bet.

The same question

Illustrator usually preferred for logos. Since it is a vector program
the type will be smoother and more scalable. If printing to a postscript
printer Illustrator is going to do the job.

More like you get a feel for which is more appropriate for each situation.

 

I use Corel Draw and Photoshop to produce magazine style brochures and
PageMaker to create whole magazines. I have done for about 11 years now. I
am always amazed at what people do with Photoshop and the lengths they go to
to do it when other products are eminently more suitable.

A professional Photographer I came across last year complained the 1
gigabyte of RAM he had in his P3, 1.1 GHz PC was not enough for the work he
was doing. He was trying to create a wall poster in Photoshop and by the
time he got all the images he was working on and the final poster open, he
had run out memory and flooded his scratch disk. Corel draw with 128 meg of
RAM breezes through these jobs.

Corel draw and (I suppose) Illustrator makes easy work of such tasks. As a
general rule of thumb, use a graphic assembly application like Corel Draw of
Adobe Illustrator to create items like advertisements for later inclusion in
books and magazines or for creating wall art or brochures.

Use Photoshop for producing photographic like images to be included in the
art piece and to manipulate photographs. Of course the line of separation
where each product is 'better' than the other is quite blurred. Until I
converted to 100% digital photography, I thought Photoshop to be overpriced
and (relatively) featureless compared to the (sometimes poor) features of
other programs.

Now that I can use the real power of Photoshop to process 100s of images in
one session, I can see the value of the product and the features I never
before used have all of a sudden become essential tools not available in
other programs. I guess this is why it is considered a professional program!
DM

 

Main reason most people use the "wrong" application, is that they know one
better than the other and they tend to stick with which one that they are
proficient at. Most professionals don't usually feel like they have time to
experiment with a different program (especially when working on a commercial
project) and they tend to dread the time/effort it sometimes takes to get up to
speed with the new stuff.

Martin

 

Coreldraw is awesome, Version 9 is a workhorse for me. Plate preview,
impositioning, it's all there. Actually being able to preview fonts, and
having a longer visible "pick list". not to mention being able to quickly
choose from the last several fonts used in the document. An intuitive,
completely customizable interface.

I'll say that HALF the people who have PS loaded on their systems don't know
the difference vetween a raster and vector object. Every day bus
cards/brochures come into the shop with lousy typesetting, everything
rasterized at 150 ppi.


JD

 

A particularly insightful comment. I consider the WORST insult people
throw at me when complimenting my photographs goes something like this...


"Oh look at these wonderful photographs, you must have a really good camera"

I just bite my tongue. They mean well.

JP

 

No, not Illustrator. Would you believe the latest version *still* only
allows one page at a time. Multipage art in Illustrator? Maybe next
century ;-)

My favoured combination is actually Corel Draw and Freehand, but then
you use what you're familiar with

 

I looked at Freehand for the first time this week, out of curiousity. I have
some experience with Flash.

After only 20 seconds, Freehand felt more "like home" to me than Illustrator
ever did, or probably ever will.

JD

 

Yes, the latest version is so far ahead of Illustrator - the only
reason it;'s still on my hard disk is in case I have any compatibility
problems. I haven't yet

 

My workhorse remains CorelDraw, more than capable for my extensive needs.
But I think I could get into Freehand more readily than illus.

Looking at Illus.' UI reminds me of flipping through an algebra textbook for
the first time. Layer styles are cool, the program will be dependable... but
my God, I couldn't work with that for 8 hours a day like I can with Draw.
The UI sucks the life right out of me. I know I'm not alone, at least one
company has created a thirdy part solution for a variety of Adobe UI's.

http://www.globalshareware.com/Utilities/Other-Softwares/Adobe-Illustrator-I
nterface-Improver.htm


JD

it's still on my hard disk is in case I have any compatibility problems. I
haven't yet

 

The real killer for me is the lack of multipage. You can only do one
page at a time and that's useless.

 

Wow, that's a lot of material to digest. I've been playing with Illustrator
some and I'm coming to like it. Mind you, I said "playing", as in getting a
feel for what it can do. This is a new world for me, so I'm going slowly. So
far, I have not run into any barriers with either PhotoShop or Illustrator,
but I have not tackled any real complicated jobs yet.

Thanks for the information everyone!

 

Useless to us, but not Adobe

How can a company be profitable by putting relevant tools and resources in
one place, instead of having users bounce around from app to app to app to
get anything done? The money's in the multiple apps at multiple prices.
Adobe excels at this. They package it all together in sales bundles like CS
and prev. the Designer Collection and are able to make people feel like it's
a "good deal" relative to the competition.

What would be interesting is seeing Macromedia throw a page layout app into
the ring. They have the engineering talent to do it. I have a feeling
Version 1 would be more useful and productive than Quark version 6.

The "round-trip workflow" between Draw and Photopaint is awesome. It allows
designers to design, not open and close 4-6 programs all day, hunting and
pecking for linked files. And you can have multiple pages! With Adobe, that
"feature" is 300.00 more!

JD

 

Yes, I agree

That would be nice, but I think Macromedia have decided the
electronic, i.e. web world is where they will concentrate their
efforts. You only have to look at Freehand where they have heavily
developed the web side whilst hardly doing anything with the print
side. Having said that, anything has got to be better than Quark (and
InDesign definitely is). However, I don't need all the features of
InDesign and as they will no doubt be adding activation to that in the
near future I've been looking at other options. Basically, anything
that isn't Quark And there seems to be a nice alternative if
you're interested. Take a look at Serif's PagePlus v.9 It can output
in all versions of Acrobat and even comes with two PDF/X1a presets.

You can find it at: http://www.serif.com/pageplus/pageplus9/index.asp

Yes, I find that useful although, I have to say I use Photoshop more
than anything. But when I don't have much manipulation to do it's
easier to just drop something into Photopaint. What worries me however
is that, since Corel collapsed and got taken over by Venture
capitalists, nothing much seems to have been done. The last review I
read of Draw 12 concluded that the Draw Suite "seems to be dying on
it's feet".

 

*** I was reading yesterday about Indesign CS's ability to create "rich
media" pdfs - that have embedded video right inside a PDF file. That's
really something...

However, I don't need all the features of

*** Someone I know across the pond bought it recently and found it
surprisingly capable, for 1/10th the price of Quark..

***Some of the more interesting things happening in the Corel community
lately are VBA Macros that do unique things. Check out the link if you are
bored. The securidesign plugin is pretty cool.

http://oberonplace.com/

Also, this guy has a nifty site and tool.

http://www.isocalc.com/

A unique thing about the community of Corel users is the enthusiam to assist
other Corelians. Sincere and useful help is only a newsgroup post away.

JD

 

Thanks for the info.