Photoshop and Illustrator - How Good Does It Get?
by: Maricon Williams

Which is the better program – Photoshop or Illustrator? Many of us are still entertaining hazy notions about the two programs. It is high time to distinguish the two - which is which really?

To boot, Adobe Photoshop is a bitmap image processing and manipulation program. It is well matched with creating, transforming and outputting digital images of a photographic nature which share common pixels in a bitmap. Its primary operations include access or acquisition of photographic digital graphics; alter, transform, modify, and colorize pixels in the images; produce digital files and prepare complicated color or black and white images for further processing. Photoshop manipulates individual color pixels within a fixed bitmap. A less costly version of Photoshop is Photoshop Elements (PSE). It can do 90% of what Photoshop does without the higher-end pre-press printing capabilities.

Adobe Illustrator, on the other hand, is a vector-based postscript drawing program which creates curved paths called Bezier curves connected by modifiable anchor points. Through these anchors, the file is eventually editable since they do not leave the file. Vector based drawing program create various elements of the image as individual vector objects which retain their characteristics and do not become a piece of a bitmap. Illustrator can do many things just like Photoshop. It can do everything that a graphic designer wants to be done except manipulate photos.

Both Photoshop and Illustrator have capabilities of the other. Photoshop creates vector objects like shapes and topography. Conversely, once they are rasterized, they become part of the bitmap. Illustrator offers a magnificent array of artistry like colorizing, painting and brushing however, what are created are vector objects and not bitmaps. Thus, it can tend to be confusing.

Even the graphic masters prefer to acquire both Photoshop and Illustrator because of their distinctive capabilities that complement each other. If you are to modify, acquire, print or arrange the web images of a photographic nature, you can have the PS or PSE program. If you are to create complicated graphics like logos, schematics, maps, brochures, menus and the likes especially with typography then you should use Illustrator.

Both of them have lots of features that we can tend to be indecisive for a point in time to choose which one to get. Truly, they are both great! The only thing you should be aware of is to ask yourself what projects and activities you want to make?, what software suit them best? And then off you can go and enjoy your creativity and craftsmanship…