Photoshop vs Illustrator and Why the Right Tool Matters

Maybe you have played around with Photoshop to edit some photos. Maybe you’ve even messed around with Illustrator just to see what it is really capable of. But if you’re undertaking a serious design project, then it’s time to get down to brass tacks.

The fact is that Photoshop and Illustrator are both powerful tools, but only in the right context. So in the following post, we will be taking a side-by-side look at both software suites and helping you figure out which one would be best for your design needs.

Photoshop Vs Illustrator At A Glance

Photoshop 101

You have probably encountered Photoshop at some point in your life. After all, it’s been around for 35+ years! It’s the most renowned and widely used photo editing software in the world.

But how much do you really know about it? Here’s a basic breakdown of Photoshop, how it works, and its features:

Pixel Editing

Adobe Photoshop uses raster (bitmap) images, which are composed of pixels, as opposed to vector images. Pixels are essentially just digital squares of color. This makes it an excellent choice for fine, minuscule, detailed photo editing.

Review the illustration below for more details on vector and raster (bitmap) images.

Layered Workflow

Photoshop uses layers (think of them as transparent sheets). Images can be placed on layers and stacked during editing. This allows you to make changes without altering the original image.

Resolution Limitations

Since Photoshop uses pixel data, its files are resolution-dependent. This means that each file can only hold a limited number of pixels, which will affect the overall image quality. This is why some images that are blown up or expanded lose quality since the pixels are being stretched out to accommodate the sizing.

Illustrator 101

Adobe Illustrator has also been available for over three decades, but it may only be familiar to people with experience in graphic design.

Here’s a basic breakdown of the most common features.

Vector-Based Graphics

Illustrator uses vector graphics, which are mathematical anchors made up of lines and curves. These images aren’t pixel-dependent, so they can be scaled infinitely without losing quality. (Again, for better understanding, review the Vector Vs. Bitmap illustration above.) 

Unique Tools

Illustrator uses the pen and shape tools that allow creators to draw crisp lines, clean curves, perfect geometric shapes, and detailed illustrations.

Creating Something New

As the name implies, Illustrator allows for precision drawing of new images, whereas Photoshop is more of an editing tool.

Adobe puts it in their own words when they say that Illustrator is…

The industry standard design app that lets you capture your creative vision with shapes, colors, effects, and typography.

That pretty well covers it in a nutshell.

When to use Photoshop and when Illustrator?

Photoshop

Reimagining Old Photos

The colorize feature allows you to take old photos (even polaroids) and modernize them. You can colorize old black-and-white photos and add color corrections to areas of the image that need them.

Background Correction

A great tool for corporate and personal use, Photoshop allows you to correct the backgrounds of your images. With Photoshop, you can enhance your image assets for social media, products, digital illustrations, and more. There is even a content-aware fill feature in Photoshop that allows you to eliminate background errors and manipulate the image to suit your specific needs.

Composite Images

Photoshop allows you to quickly combine different images into one. This is a creative tool that can be applied to personal or professional projects.

Mockup Design

Photoshop is great for mockup design as it allows you to quickly create realistic representations of a product. Many industry professionals use Photoshop to generate images of a product that has not been manufactured yet. This gives investors, shareholders, and all pertinent parties a clearer idea of a new product or service.

Creating GIFs

The ability to make GIFs easily with Photoshop is a boon to content creators who need to generate funny, informative, and engaging animated files. Photoshop uses a Timeline that allows creators to arrange frames of animation. The frames can be edited and customized to create original GIFs.

Digital Painting

Digital painting in Photoshop mainly uses brushes and layers and intuitively recreates the traditional painting process. You have many brushes at your disposal and can control the size, hardness, opacity, and flow of each. You can also use layers to edit isolated sections of the painting, so you won’t ruin the entire work if you don’t like the changes you’ve made.

The digital painting function can be put to many uses, including illustrations, poster art, character design, rough sketches, detail refining, educational diagrams, social media art, UI icons, and much more.

Illustrator

Designing Logos

Illustrator is great for designing logos and branding from scratch, as the lines and curves will stay crisp no matter what size you make them. You can also easily export your files in SVG, PDF, or EPS formats. This allows for faithful recreations of your logos, whether they are meant for digital media, print, apps, the web, videos, or animation.

Infographic Design

This is a great tool for creating visual representations of your data in crisp, easily digestible graphics. The Adobe Fonts feature allows for detailed control over color and typography that is essential for informative images.

Printed Assets

Since Illustrator allows you to scale your images to any size without the blurring and warping typical in raster graphics, it is often used to create printed assets. These can include business cards, packaging, stickers, pamphlets, and even apparel.

Real-World Templates

Illustrator has even been used to create design templates for pottery, stained glass patterns, illustrations, and more. The vector design elements make it easier to draw various templates and stencils for materials that would otherwise be difficult to work with physically. One grateful Illustrator user puts it like this:

I’m able to create the ideas in my head more easily using Illustrator than hand drawing, though I can also start from a scanned drawing or one of my photos, all of which I appreciate. I also do mock-ups of color combinations and shape ideas prior to starting projects with 3D material that can be unforgiving.

Technical Drawings

Savvy users have utilized Illustrator to create technical drawings such as blueprints, schematics, maps, and even medical illustrations. Again, the vector imaging allows for very precise, mathematical drawings, which are crucial for these kinds of materials.

Should I Use Them Together?

It’s important to note at this point that Photoshop and Illustrator are not competing software suites. In fact, they are made by the same company. In many ways, they were actually designed to work together – and this is how many professional and casual users employ them.

Photoshop and Illustrator can work very well together. For instance, you can use Illustrator to create clean vector elements like logos and icons, and then import them into Photoshop, where you can add custom textures, combine with photos, and apply various effects (lighting, emboss, glow, etc) to optimize the asset.

And because both suites are made by Adobe, it’s very easy to copy and paste images from one suite to another. For example, Illustrator files can be imported to Photoshop as “Smart Objects,” which allows you to layer the image without altering the original copy – a great tool for editing and touching images up.

Which is Right For Me?

If you’re serious about graphic design, you are going to want to familiarize yourself with both Photoshop and Illustrator. Some scenarios really only require one or the other, though.

When to Use Photoshop:

• Your project involves photo editing exclusively
• You are creating pixel-based artwork, such as digital illustrations and paintings
• You are creating social media and web graphics like thumbnails, banners, and social media posts
• You need to manipulate or correct existing photos
• You need to add effects to enhance an image

When to Use Illustrator:

• You need to create branding assets and design a logo
• Your website requires UI graphics, such as website icons and custom buttons
• You need custom typography, lettering, color palettes, and patterns to enhance marketing assets
• The final asset needs to be rendered on-screen and in print
• Your image needs to be scaled up by a significant amount

Important Features and Accessibility

At this point, you may be inspired and ready to get your Illustrator/Photoshop project underway. Before you do, take a moment to familiarize yourself with some important features that will surely streamline your efforts:

Free Online Versions

Photoshop

Photoshop has a free, web-based version that allows you to drag and drop images and use basic editing tools. However, there are limitations. For example, the web version of Photoshop gives you fewer brushes to work with and reduced export options compared to the full, paid version.

This is understandable, after all, it is a free online tool!

Illustrator

There is also a web-based version of Illustrator with similar limitations, like restricted access to advanced features, no advanced vector toolkit, and generative AI features.

AI Capabilities

Photoshop

Photoshop AI features include a “generative fill” feature that allows you to select a part of an image and input a text prompt of how you want that part to be edited. You can also generate entirely new images with a simple text prompt. Photoshop AI also helps you match lighting, shadows, and colors of disparate images so they can be stitched together or combined to form a cohesive image.

Illustrator

With Illustrator AI, you can use text prompts to create vector patterns, recolor vector artwork, and automatically fill parts of an image with vector details.

Plugins and Addons

Photoshop

There are workflow, image effect, retouching, and utility plugins for Photoshop. For example, Retouch4me is a popular Photoshop add-on that uses AI to make corrections to fine details of an image.

Another popular plugin is Nik Collection, which adds color drama to your pictures, including black and white, sharpening, cool effects, and more.

Illustrator

Creative effect addons like Gold Rush can apply stylistic effects to your images.

There are also workflow and productivity plugins for Illustrator, including Hot Door Control, which makes it easier to organize your artboards with tagging and time-logging tools.

There are organizational plugins as well. One example of this kind is Fontshelf, which makes it easier to manage large font libraries. This works for Photoshop as well!

Other Apps

Photoshop

Photoshop has a whole ecosystem of mobile apps, including Photoshop Express (great for quick edits and touchups), Adobe Express, Adobe Fresco (ideal for digital painting on mobile devices like iPads), and Adobe Firefly, which creates images from text prompts and allows the user to edit the AI-generated images.

These apps are available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices – though functionality may differ across platforms.

Illustrator

Illustrator has a dedicated iPad app that is best suited for professional-level vector design. Apps like Illustrator Draw, Adobe Express, and Adobe Capture are all available for iOS and Android.

Fresco, an app that lets you illustrate with vectors and use actual raster brushes, is available for iOS and some Windows operating systems.

Why Should You Use Plugins and Addons?

In a nutshell, plugins and add-ons incorporate helpful features that aren’t built into the app. They can enhance productivity, give you more tools for creativity, and automate some of the more mundane details of graphic design projects:

Benefits of Photoshop Plugins

• Enhanced Native Functionality – You can get filters and textures that aren’t included in the native app.
• Language Support – Some plugins allow for quick adjustments to language across multiple assets.
• Further Integration – Photoshop plugins like Icons8 integrate stock images into your work suite. Integrating Photoshop with external systems also allows you to customize your workspace depending on typical project needs/preferences.
• More Features – Plugins like Neural Filters add features to your Photoshop suite without the need for additional software. For example, the Neural Filters plugin adds super zoom, JPEG artifact removal, depth blur, landscape mixture, style transfer, and other features to Photoshop.

Benefits of Illustrator Plugins

• Streamlined Workflow – Many Illustrator plugins feature vector effects and pattern generators to quickly stylize an image and cut down project duration.
• Automation – Plugins like Astute Graphics’ VectorScribe automatically make anchor point adjustments so you don’t have to. This cuts down on the time spent on more mundane aspects of editing.
• Specific Styles – Some plugins have a library of textures that can be quickly applied to any image, which makes it easy for Illustrator noobs to affect a specific style or aesthetic.

How to Choose the Right Plugin

There is a dizzying number of plugins to choose from. Photoshop alone boasts 1,100 plugins on the official Adobe Exchange market.

So how do you choose the right one?

Here are some tips…

Define Your Goals

There are productivity and workflow plugins that can make your project easier. Some plugins give you more creative tools. There is virtually no limit to the kinds of plugins available for both Photoshop and Illustrator, so ask yourself what problems you need to solve and what your goals are for the project. This will give you a basic roadmap to the plugins you should be using.

Check Versions

Some modern plugins won’t work with older versions of Photoshop and Illustrator. So you should always check compatibility before you install or pay for a plugin.

Choose Reliable Publishers

Some smaller plugin developers may not offer comprehensive support for their product, leaving you in the dark on technical aspects and troubleshooting issues. At worst, plugins made by small, upstart developers may crash your browser or corrupt files. Usually, it’s best to stick with established and trusted developers like ON1, AlphaPlugins, and Topaz Labs.

Insist on A Trial

Reputable plugin developers will offer free trials. Some plugins may actually slow down Photoshop and Illustrator, so it’s always a good idea to test them out before you pay for them.

Reviews

Customer reviews of plugins are a great resource for finding out if the plugin you’re interested in will suit your use case. Community forums like Reddit can also provide valuable insight into the practical applications of add-ons, their limitations, and what types of projects they are best suited for.

And the Winner Is…

Both. If you’ve read this far, then you know that both Photoshop and Illustrator have their place: Photoshop is great for editing and altering existing images, while Illustrator is ideal for illustrations, lettering, branding, and logo design.

Learning both will expand your palette as a creator and make you more capable as a designer.