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.

Precision is another bonus of Illustrator. I can tell it to make a square a certain size, a circle another size and then it will give me a grid and a ruler with guides which I can use to sync up the two shapes. It will also give me points on these shapes, which I can manipulate individually to create specifically skewed images. With the brushes and the tools available I can drop an already created image on a page and manipulate it to suit my needs by creating outlines. I can set up an entire page of boxes and circles and be sure it fits in the page size and printing parameters I need it for.

Photoshop is endlessly useful in touching up photographs. I've removed air conditioners from houses, obliterated red eye, and even whitened teeth. Using the selection tools it's easy to either black out the entire background or fade it until it is a blur behind a central figure. Layering makes just about any combination of blending images possible and the filter effects let you take something mundane and turn it into the abstract. Adjusting light levels and color variations can save almost every dark or tinted photo ever taken. Perhaps there is a stray wisp of hair floating in front of Mona Lisa's face. No problem with the cloning tool, you can make the hair disappear and replace the face with the face. It is truly amazing.

Perhaps the best use I've seen so far is a family portrait. It's not easy to get fifteen people, including toddlers, to look at the camera and all have on a perfect face at the same exact moment the flash goes off, never mind the blinking that goes on. With a little Photoshop knowledge and some time six not perfect pictures can merged into perfection. A mouth here, a whole face there, even an entire head can be transposed. Shadows taken out and glare from glasses removed no one would ever know it wasn't one miraculously perfect moment.

To buy both programs is a huge expense but in the long run, with a little time invested in learning how they work, I think most people will wonder how they used one without the other.