: Photoshop or Illustrator OR ... I am a huge Photoshop guy, been one for like 10 years now. But I see more and more resources around Illustrator, I realize Illustrator is great for vector

@Steve758

I'm, and have been for over 10 years as well, a huge fan of Photoshop as well. Just recently I noticed that there's tons of vector work that doesn't even look vector, and in contrast to the normal vector stuff I've seen (which seemed all to be "retro" to defend the fact that drawing with Illustrator Pen Tool is a "bit" more time consuming than Photoshop Brush with Wacom Tablet).

So, exited about these new artworks I grabbed my illustrator and started to play around with it. So far it's been 50% in co-operation with photoshop and 50% stand-alone. And to me, in future, it seems it's gonna be alot more co-operation than stand-alone. I do work a little with print stuff as well so in that respect it's gonna be a huge benefit to discover the possibilities, but I see tons of use with the web as well. One being the already mentioned Web 2.0 trend (not a huge fan of trends but I'm not always being asked, ha ha.)

Another one being the flexibility and reusability of vectors, oh my.. I'd say, if you got web stuff coming out, leave the drop shadows and that stuff for photoshop to handle, and concentrate on just the forms. I've heard someone saying illustrator is better with gradients than photoshop but I've got no evidence to back it up.

Illustrator definately provides killer tools for clean objects like icons and buttons etc, with all the cool gradient "shadings" for the popular realistic-like-but-not-THAT-realistic-looks.

So, is it worth the time for photoshop enthusiastic? Hell yeah. Even if I just manipulate my photos? Well, no, it's not that good.

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@Cody3331749

Personally I like drawing vectors in Flash better than Illustrator. If you've never tried it, Flash takes a very different approach to how the lines are constructed. For example in Illustrator if you draw a line, then draw a second line crossing the first, you now have two independent vectors that happen to overlap. In Flash if you draw a line then draw a second line crossing the first, you now have four line segments that meet in the middle.

I find it a much more fluid way of drawing while still having the resolution-independent advantages of vectors.

(Incidentally I could talk your ears off about the history of why the drawing tools in Flash work that way, but long story short it's on Wikipedia.)

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@Harper654

There was a time when Illustrator and Photoshop served two different purposes, vector based illustration in one and bitmap based painting and drawing in the other. But in the later versions they have began to overlap in purpose and use.

Web 2.0 design leans heavily on illustration style artwork so more designers are using Adobe Illustrator and other vector based tools. If you like the Web 2.0 style Illustrator is a great tool to use if you have it, but if all you have is Photoshop then know that many of the effects created in illustrator may also be created by using Photoshop.

I love Illustrator and use it a lot even though I feel I have more skills using Photoshop because I have been creating line drawings, charts, and curvy lines. Then I import them as smart objects in Photoshop, tweak on them maybe adding something photographic, and save them as PNGs.

I use both apps and enjoy creating artwork in them both pretty equally, so to answer your question of "...is it better for 'creation' in general?" I don't think it is better, but is equal and can be very complimentary.

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@Kimberly620

Illustrator

Creating curves and complex shapes is what Illustrator excels at. To that end, it makes a
lot of sense to use it when creating icons and such from scratch, or when vector format is a requirement.

Photoshop

By contrast there are a lot of photographic effects that Illustrator is not so great for, and you may actually have to import whatever you create in Illustrator to Photoshop to finish it off. For web graphics, Photoshop is almost always the final step before HTML for me.

Fireworks

One other tool that's worth checking out is Fireworks. It has a limited feature set by comparison. But it supports both vector and bitmap-based graphics. And it's been designed from the ground up for web graphics. With all of its built-in styles and shapes you can actually be very efficient with your time in Fireworks. And I've seen some really good web designs come out of it.

Conclusion

If your design is for the web, of course, there may not be a huge advantage of doing everything in vector form. In the end you'll probably be using PNG's and JPG's anyway. But if you're doing it for something like Silverlight, WPF, Flash, etc, then vector form is often preferred. With all that said, I simply haven't been able to pick a favorite tool from the list above. Sometimes in fact I'll use two tools for a given project. It all depends on the job.

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