difference between photoshop and illustrator

[mollymoo]

Hi

I own photoshop but got given a file that opens in illustrator, i am confused even after looking at the site as to what the difference is between the to bits of software as they seem to do the same thing. can anyone help tell me what is the difference thanks

[ChuckFickens]

they are both obviously image manipulation/drawing programs but they work in very different ways and are primary suited for different tasks.

Very basically

Photoshop is aimed at modifying and touching up existing photos

Illustrator is more of a drawing program to create pictures and drawings from scratch.

for a more in depth explanation

http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/best.h tml

[rojash]

Photoshop uses bitmap or raster graphics, whereas illustrator uses vector graphics.
The biggest advantage of vector graphics for illustrations, logos etc, is that (as the file is simply a list of instructions - such as "draw a line from x1,y1 to x2,y2) the output can be scaled to any size without degradation.

[fo3nix]

Rojash is on the money.

There are two main ways of drawing pictures.

One way is to imagine the picture as being made of lots of little dots, but really small dots so that you can't see them (and just the picture that they make up). These are called raster images. Photoshop is an example of an editor that uses raster images. Windows Paint and Gimp are two other example packages.

Another way is to write the mathematical equations for the lines and curves and points in the picture. These are called vector graphics.

Raster images have certain advantages, and are useful for composing photographs. Photos get a bit complicated to be drawn as vector graphics though, so they aren't usually used for this. Instead, vector graphics are usually used for logos, poster art, that kind of thing. Big solid blocks of colour, nice mathematically-described straight lines and curves, and some text.

Because vector graphics are described with mathematics, they can just all be multiplied by 2 for example, to get an image twice the size. No loss of quality, because the image is just redrawn at this size, according to the mathematics. If you did this with a raster image, you'd have to make all the dots twice as large, making them more visible, and the image would start to look weird.

Advantages of other vector graphics software inclues Inkscape (free), and Vector Designer on the Mac. Corel draw is also a vector package.