What’s the difference between Illustrator and Photoshop?
Let’s use an example of a logo. If I designed and created a logo in Illustrator, and the finished size is 5 inches x 5 inches, I resize this logo to be 30 inches x 30 inches for a billboard, and the logo would be as sharp and crisp as it was still 5 inches x 5 inches. Now, if you create this logo in Photoshop and then increased to 30×30, do you think the logo will be sharp and crisp? If you answer no, then you are correct. The logo would be pixelated and blurry. And for a logo, you don’t want to use a pixelated logo!
Photoshop is an excellent software for doing image manipulation, retouching, and mockups. Photoshop is a raster graphics editor. Meaning, a formation of pixels of various colours, which together form an image.
What is a pixel?
It is a square, the smallest editable element of a digital photographic file or a device. Pixels, is also short for “picture elements,” which are the building blocks that make up a digital image — the tiny individual dots that a camera uses to capture a scene or that a computer uses to display images on-screen.
Why would I use Illustrator?
First of all, Illustrator, are composed of paths and is considered as vector graphics. Although I can’t manipulate a photo in Illustrator, I still could do simple things such as converting the colour modes in Illustrator is I had no other choice to do so. It is excellent in creating logos, ads, interfaces, icons and posters.
Choosing File Formats
When dealing with file formats, they will differ in the way they represent image data (as pixels or vectors), and support different compression. If you are working with Photoshop, and you need to preserve layers, effects, masks, filters, and so on, save a copy of your image in Photoshop format (PSD) or a Tiff (Tagged Image File Format). The difference between the two file formats is PSD maximum size limit is 2GB, while Tiffs can handle more than 2GB.
File Compression
Many file formats use compression to reduce the file size of images. Lossless compress the file without removing image detail or colour information. Lossy removes detail. The file sizes are much more significant bigger for TIFF and PNG, but JPEG/JPG file sizes are much smaller. Images are usually saved as JPEGs to make them as little as possible to be viewed and/or delivered quickly via the internet. The user can choose different quality levels to adjust the compromise between file size and image quality. The following are commonly used compression techniques:
GIF, TIFF, PNG, are examples of lossless compression and JPEG/JPG is an example of lossy compression.
I won’t repeat myself here with file resolutions, detail information on types of formats to saving images for the web. For more information, have a read
File formats in Illustrator
When you save files from Illustrator, the four main choices you have for are Adobe Illustrator Document (.ai), Illustrator EPS (.eps), and Adobe PDF (.pdf) and Scalable Vector Graphic (.svg).
Adobe native file format for Illustrator is .ai. Unfortunately, if .ai is saved, only Illustrator can open this file format, and you retain all your editability and transparency in your file. Works excellent when placing into Photoshop or InDesign. The .ai format is my preferred method for saving files when working in Illustrator — followed up with SVG. SVG is a vector graphic and an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated. The SVG format can contain vector shapes and paths, raster graphics (images) and text. Lately, the SVG format is used for Web-based work.
Another format you could save your work is PDF or EPS. EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), is supported by almost all standard graphics applications. Unfortunately, .eps files do not support transparency. The .eps format was the “standard” file format for saving artwork to be used for print production work. Adobe PDF (.pdf) can be used. A file from Illustrator saved as a .pdf file. It will save the data so that any PDF reader can understand and display the file.
Illustrator also allows you to “export” your file to nearly a dozen other formats (which also means it can read them) such as .jpg, .png, .swf (Flash), .bmp, .tif, .txt (text format) and wmv (Windows metafile).
If I had the choice to get one software, and it was between Illustrator or Photoshop, hands down, I grab Illustrator. Overall, Illustrator has a lot of flexibility in the formats it saves as, allowing you to maximize the file use in other applications.