Photoshop vs Illustrator - A student asks....

Recently on my Facebook site, I received a question from a young designer, Lilly Blue:

"I am an artist and have recently fallen in love with illustration. I am wondering if you could offer some advice about which program would be best for someone beginning with original images? Is it beneficial to understand and utilize both programs?"

My reply and subsequent discussions have been posted here for your interest...

My Reply: Welcome, Lily and thank you for posting your discussion topic. It's a beauty actually - because everyone has different opinions on which program is best and will argue the point endlessly. For me personally, I've always used both and couldn't survive without one or the other! And I would ALWAYS recommend to any new illustrator or designer to learn both programs.

But that doesn't mean you should go out and get them both straight away! If you are using original images and want to create the sort of fantastic illustrations posted on the wall earlier from the Smashing Magazine Site, Photoshop is probably your guy. If, however you want to create, say, logos or illustrations from an original drawing with a transparent background to be reproduced in print, signage etc, you'd be better off with Illustrator.

Let me try and give you a bit of background info to help you decide what you need right now.
Illustrator is aimed at complicated drawings, logo creation, single page designs using lots of type or anything that may need to be re-scaled without losing any clarity. It uses and creates vectors - drawings made up of points that produce very smooth and accurate shapes. They have transparent backgrounds, are scaleable and infinitely changeable to any size or shape and application. In fact, even text can be 'converted to outlines' to become a vector shape in Illustrator.

Photoshop's primary function was originally designed to handle raster images that are based on pixels, such as photographs. It is often used for colour correction, sharpening scans and "touching-up" photos and artwork - as you've no doubt seen on magazine covers and the like. But you can also create awesome original illustrations and layered photographic illustrations by experimenting with a large library of effects, brush filters and layers.

Photoshop provides some vector based tools including type and a drawing tool similar to the ones in Illustrator, but ultimately once you've finished, all will be rasterised - put simply - turned into one single image made of pixels. And you always need to be aware, that when you create an image in Photoshop and then try to make it a lot bigger, it will blur because of the pixels. [Just like blowing up a photograph]. No good creating a gorgeous A4 size poster in Photoshop if it has to be reproduced on a billboard - but there are methods you can use to make all that sort of stuff work....

Illustrator on the other hand, uses mathmatical calculations, so no matter how big you make your image it will never lose clarity. So..... When it comes to logos, I believe they should, whenever possible, be initially designed in vector format [using Illustrator or another vector based program] so you always have a scalable image file that will not lose resolution when re-sized. You can have fun with them in Photoshop later.

Bottomline - If you're a beginner you'll probably have a lot more fun with Photoshop. It's a very powerful program and I'd say easier to learn than Illustrator.

I hope I haven't confused you. If the vector raster issue is making your head spin, have a look at the following article. It's kinda long and boring but excellent.
http://www.eastbywest.com/pub/vectorbitmap/

If you want to read more about the difference between the two programs, there's heaps of blogs out there. Have a look at this one for starters:
http://www.zimbio.com/Adobe+Photoshop/articles/315/Photoshop+vs+Illustrator

And I'm sure a lot of the guys here on the Buzz Design House Page will have heaps of tips and ideas to contribute. Anyone interested? :-) Linda

Lilly Blue: Thank you for such a clear, detailed, rich and informative response! For the first time I finally have a grasp on the difference between the programs. You are a gift - Lilly :o)

Thoughts on Illustration and it's relevance in today's market...

Design is not art, and I wouln't treat is as such. But! I have always believed that illustration used in a design [which is, effectivelly art for a purpose] can be a powerful tool that can be used as well or better than a photograph, to visually communicate a story or idea in a design piece.

Being a designer that has 'dabbled' in Art, I have had the opportunity to incorporate some of my own artwork into design pieces - and the client always ended up with a wonderfullly unique piece of work that had no danger of 'popping' up somewhere else in somone else's work.

Unfortunately....sigh.... Illustration is quickly becoming a forgotten art in the cut-throat business world and a completely underutilized communication tool.

I would love to continue to use illustration in my design work, but this has proven to be quite a challenge. Clients prefer photography over illustration because they see it as somehow being “more realistic” or “more honest,” even though photography has become increasingly more unreal. [aka...the furore of photoshop retouching and so on and so forth].

Stock illustration houses are killing the demand for original illustration and the acceleration of the design process brought on by advances in technology has made clients impatient and unwilling to go through the sketch and idea development phase that has always been a part of commissioning original illustration.

I 'd love to see more designers encourage an illustration revival with clients but I fear that, just like other once popular, but now outmoded practices, this will not happen.