The Symbiosis of Photoshop and Illustrator

Adobe Photoshop is the tool of choice and trade. Everyone has heard of it and you can see it used on thousands of web pages, sometimes with amazing results, sometimes rather haphazardly. In ten years of graphic designing for a promotional products company and the six years of customer service in the same industry previous to that I found it is nearly impossible to separate Adobe Illustrator from Photoshop when you want to get the best result.

Illustrator is a vector-based program where Photoshop is pixel-based. Photoshop will allow you to wrap text with some fancy moves, Illustrator will allow you to type, wrap, warp, manipulate and colorize text which you can then move into Photoshop for additional tweaking. Photoshop will let you paint and draw free hand with a mouse, Illustrator gives you precise tools for drawing straight lines and curves with controls, which make tracing a shape or image immeasurably easier.

Both programs are amazing. I use Photoshop to edit photographs, super impose my friend's heads on various bodies, and add detailed colorization to things I have created in Illustrator. I use Illustrator to set and wrap copy which I then past or move into Photoshop. I use it to design jewelry pieces in black and white for production purposes and color for client approvals. I use it to create customized invoices, stationary, and advertisements. By pulling pieces back and forth between the two programs I am able to create a wider more job specific body of work.

My top reason for loving Illustrator is the ease and choices I have for text. By drawing a shape first I have the ability to fill it with text as if it were a confined word document. If the project calls for wrapping the text around the shape I am able to elongate, space, and skew the letters until they are spaced as needed. The font choices can be endless and even if you don't have that font available to you in Photoshop you are given the option to turn it into outlines which will translate into Photoshop and be editable there.