How to Understand the Difference Between Illustrator and Photoshop

If you plan to create digital images, you need to understand the differences between a drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator and a paint (graphics) program such as Adobe Photoshop.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Photoshop

1. Understand that Illustrator creates vector graphics and vector text. Vector graphics consist of lines and curves that contain mathematical objects called vectors.

2. Know that Photoshop creates bitmapped graphics. Bitmaps consist of tiny dots of color. The eye fills in the spaces between the dots so the color appears to be solid. Bitmapped graphics are measured by the number of dots per unit - usually called dpi (dots per inch).

3. Realize that bitmap graphics are much larger in file size than vector graphics. Therefore, vector images take up much less storage space and can be downloaded faster.

4. Understand that you can scale a vector graphic to any size without losing quality. A bitmap will change quality if you enlarge it or reduce it.

5. Know that some filters can be applied to bitmap images but cannot be applied to vector images.

Tips & Warnings

• Illustrator will allow you to convert a vector image to a bitmap. It will also allow you to import bitmapped images but you cannot edit them in the program.
• You cannot use vector images for Web graphics unless the images are incorporated into special technologies such as Macromedia Flash.

[satir]

on 6/16/2008 the thing is, that i've used photoshop many time to create vectors, so am still not sure why i need illustrator?

[evolutioned]

on 5/8/2008 2. Photoshop also has the ability to create vector objects.

3. A bitmapped image converted to vector can end up larger in file size then the original. It all depends on the image and quality settings chosen in conversion.

4. If you convert a bitmap to vector, it may only look good at smaller sizes. You can scale this up, but will you lose quality? It won't look like it does as a vector scaled the same size as the original bitmap..