From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Working with Illustrator

The difference between pixels and vectors

From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Working with Illustrator

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The difference between pixels and vectors

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- [Instructor] I'd like to say a few words about the fundamental difference between pixels and vectors. Photoshop is primarily about creating pixel based imagery and Illustrator is primarily about creating vector based imagery. That doesn't tell the whole story because Photoshop can handle vectors to some extent and conversely, Illustrator can handle pixels to some extent, but that remains the fundamental divide between the two. If I zoom in on this picture of a swan after a certain view percentage, those pixels are going to start to look like what they are, a map of bits, colored squares, that make up the image. The implication of this is that pixel based imagery is resolution dependent. It's only as good as the number of pixels that are in the image and that number needs to be an appropriate number. More is not better. It all depends on what you intend to do with the image. You will need more pixels if you intend to print it than if you intend to just represent it onscreen. Illustrator on the other hand, is all about vectors and if I zoom in on this artwork, no matter how much I zoom the artwork remains smooth. And if I were to select it, we can see that we have this wire frame that reveals how the image was constructed. The implication for us is that vector based artwork created in Illustrator is resolution independent. Or, to put it another way, it is completely scalable. Throughout the course we're going to look at ways in which we can combine vectors and pixels in a way that plays to the strengths of both Photoshop and Illustrator.

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