Tom Arah explores the vector and bitmap capabilities in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop and how to make the most of them.

Photoshop and Illustrator are the twin graphical pillars of Adobe’s Creative Suite. As standalones they each offer their own unique mix of state-of-the-art vector and bitmap-based handling but, for maximum creative power, their respective strengths can also be pooled.

In fact the Creative Suite only makes full sense if the end user makes full use of both Photoshop and Illustrator both separately and together. To understand just what power they offer and how best to put it to use, it’s necessary to see where it came from in the first place.
Moreover it’s important to realise that things were once very different. Back in 1992, when I first got my hands on Photoshop and Illustrator after their recent port to the Windows platform, these were entirely different beasts. To begin with, meaningful integration was not an issue – in fact the two programs were presented as opposite poles that were best kept apart. Generally users worked with either Illustrator’s vectors or with Photoshop’s bitmaps and never the twain should meet.
Each application was also unrecognisable from the creative powerhouse that it has become today. This was particularly evident with Illustrator, which despite its name and the use of the famous Botticelli Venus logo, was in no way an application for artists. It’s difficult to believe now but, even in its fourth release, Illustrator’s creative formatting options were beyond dismal. You could apply flat CMYK or Pantone-specified colours and uniform width lines that were either solid or dashed and that was about it.
The reason usually given for this poverty of creative options was that Illustrator was a vector application and that, if you wanted creativity flexibility, you should be using the bitmap-based Photoshop where the underlying unit wasn’t the mathematically-defined open path and filled shape but the individual pixel. But that didn’t wash. In particular the same limits simply didn’t apply to Illustrator’s biggest rival on the PC, CorelDRAW, which happily mixed imported bitmaps and vector objects complete with bitmap fills and bitmap effects including advanced graduated transparency. Features that other programs, most notably Xara and Macromedia Fireworks, took further to produce creative, even naturalistic, bitmap-based images built on vector-based handling.
The bottom line is that, while vectors and bitmaps are very different, if you want to be seriously and artistically creative they are best combined. After all, all graphical output is eventually rasterised for bitmap-based output whether that’s to a screen or printer. Moreover all hands-on input originally starts off as vectors – after all that’s how the computer monitors your movement of the mouse turning it into a vector path along which a brush’s pixel-based effects are applied. Seen properly, vectors are the means to a bitmap-based end, so why did early versions of Illustrator so carefully avoid all bitmap-based handling and the creative power that went with it?