Photoshop and Illustrator

Photoshop and Illustrator are both Adobe graphics programs used worldwide by designers, architects and artists in general. They have similar characteristics but vary in many ways. Here some main differences:

Photoshop is a great program for modifying already created images or graphics and it is pixel based, which means that the image is made of teeny tiny colored squares. The problem with it is that if we enlarge to much a photograph or a Photoshop based image, those squares get bigger and the photograph will become blurry.

Adobe Illustrator is vector-based software, so instead of using pixels it uses mathematical constructs to create vector objects that even if enlarged infinitely will still keep the same image quality as it does if it’s scaled down. This is the reason that Illustrator is used often to create logos or anything that may need to be printed or displayed at different sizes no matter the size in which you created it in the first place.

A You Tube explanation of the differences:

The two software combined are enough to create a whatever shapes and design our mind can imagine and another amazing thing about them is that the majority of the commands are the same in both so once you’ve learned one it will get easier to learn the second. There are some important basic tools to learn and a huge amount of tutorials on You Tube to demonstrate them. I’ll post here some of them that have been very useful for me.

Photoshop:

This is a good starting point for a beginner:

Illustrator:

The pen tool is one of the most important tools in both softwares and Lynda.com explains it very well:

The rotate tool that, for example, helps building petals around a center to create a flower maintaining the proportions and distance from the center and the other petals:

Pattern generator is a tool that helps easily to create a perfect repeat instead of using a clipping mask which can be a bit more complicated in the beginning: