When to use Photoshop Vs Illstrator

Hey Ian,

I would say for me specifically as a Designer and Illustrator mainly I use the two programs in my designs together. I focus on my vector work in Illustrator and then my detail work in photoshop. Illustrator I will do all my typeface work and the main layout of my design in illustrator then I will either save out in a .TIFF format and load it into photoshop (always keeping the saved vector files incase project sizes change) or I will just export to photoshop (although sometimes I have found that this creates path mess ups so I prefer to just bring a .jpg or .tiff into photoshop). From here I will add my textures my cropping, my burning and smudging anything that I want to manipulate my smart objects. Now, this being said once you start to manipulate your smart objects in photoshop they will not be smart objects anymore, so this is why its always good to have your FINAL concept down before bringing into photoshop.

Now this is just brief but what I will also do to keep my smooth line style of illustration is I will take my white page mock up or my "doodle" and bring it into photoshop and do 1 of 2 things I will either clean up the grey space lines by changing everything to greytone and shifting the thresh hold and the levels panel and until i only have a white and black image, then going into my channels and making a new grey layer and alt selecting only the black lines then going back to my layers, create a new layer and just hit fill with black and you will have a black line seperation from your white background of your artwork. Then I go and import those black lines into illustrator and will turn them into vectors and then re import back into photoshop for coloring ( or just color in illustrator if you prefer) or my second much simpler but a bit more skill oriented technique of just using a wacom tablet in photoshop and doing a overlay sketch of your doodle and then just bringing into illustrator and either tracing over with a custom illustrator brush with a pressure setting of 3 max (only will work with wacom) or just live trace and mess with the custom options till your happy enough with the smooth line vector then import back into photoshop and erase and clean up and rinse and repeat.

I am sure there are MUCH more simple methods out there this is just my own personal preference when I am doing my illustrations to get that smooth brush liquid style.

kddraws.com and any and all of the digital art in their is done with this technique.

hope this wasnt too confusing i am working on wording steps better but to sum it up both are amazing programs and I would use both together in your own creative ways. the biggest thing not to do is let your mind get limited by which one is better or what is the industry standard etc.. Just have fun with it and create your own ways to make things look how you want. just always remember illustrator for vectors aka small as a thumbnail to big as a billboard. and photoshop for an infinite amount of textures. brushes, basically manipulating and creating. illustrator to me is the walls of the house and photoshop is the hammer if that makes any sense.

anyways cheers and hope you find your preference with both these amazing programs. STYLE, create your own style and your own ways and people who want to see your style, your work, your design will start to gravitate to you.

Have fun!

I use them for more then 15 years professionally. And my common workflow is:

Photoshop for layouts, and to build complex graphics (using brushes and other pixelbased effects) which in the end will be exported as bitmap images anyway.

Illustrator for logos and offcourse for exporting to .svg when neccessary.

Placing illustrator files into your photoshop designs gives you the flexibilty to resize without quality-loss, as they will be placed as smart objects.

Hey Ian, Photoshop and Illustrator are indeed used for different things, but they can also do many of same things. The most driving force to one or the other is preference and comfortability. I have seen designers use both for the same purposes.

In my personal opinion, Photoshop is easier to use for web design, quick edits and filtering of raster images, and exporting images for web. Illustrator is easier to use when designing a logo or dealing with specifically vector-based elements. It is also useful in developing wireframes for a site.

That being said, they can both handle the same tasks, but like you said, one is geared towards working with raster (PS), and one is for vectors (AI). I would recommend learning both, as they are both widely-used applications.

Best of luck to you!

Wow. Thanks for all of the info and advice guys!

So I've taken graphics courses in the past and never really got past that initial hump because AI and PS just seemed daunting to learn "everything". It really is a matter of just banging out some work, living, and learning. I will put all of this knowledge to good use.

I do have one more question when it comes to logo design. When desining a text logo I normally just go to DaFont or SquirrelFont, d/l fonts that I like and type out the "logo". I have a hard time really considering it a logo because, well, it's someone else's typeface design if that makes any sense.

Is this a common practice or do most designers use a standard font and style it on their own? It certainly speeds up the job when you can just snag some free fonts, however, if I were ever to use them for anything else I would have to purchase the licenese. But then these typeface logos wouldn't be "original" either, you know what i mean?

Thanks Kyle. I really appreciate that explanation. I've just always been curious. Maybe I will delve into typefaces a bit.