affinity designer vs adobe illustrator and photoshop

Photoshop and Procreate are best for surface designers who like texture and subtle color changes in their work. If you’ve ever tried recreating a watercolor design in Illustrator using the line trace feature, you’ve probably noticed how slowly your computer runs and how less successful the watercolor blending looks. Or why most surface designers who use watercolor, gouache, acrylic, or any other analog-based medium save their designs in Photoshop.Ī greeting card design from my portfolio made using Adobe Photoshop & Procreate It’s why those who prefer to design away from their computers love to use Procreate. Instead, the more important question to ask is: Which program is better for YOU to design with? Adobe Photoshop & Procreateīoth Photoshop and Procreate’s strength is the ability to display texture and fine details in a way that vector programs can’t replicate. No, I firmly believe one program isn’t inherently better than the other as each has strengths and weaknesses. So when comparing Photoshop vs Illustrator, is one superior to the other for surface design?

However, Affinity Designer is another vector program used by some surface designers. Adobe Illustrator is the gold standard of vector-based design programs, used by most companies. Because of that, you can scale vector graphics to any size without seeing any pixelation or loss of quality. Vector art, on the other hand, is based on mathematical formulas – images are created using points and lines & curves in-between the points. Adobe Photoshop is the most commonly used raster-based design program, but Procreate has gained significant popularity among surface designers over the last few years for its ease of use. That’s why it’s so important to create high-resolution art at a minimum of 300 dpi. If you scale up a raster image large enough, it will become “pixelated” and lose quality. Raster art is pixel-based where an image is made up of an arrangement of pixels or dots. Let’s start with a few definitions… What’s the difference between raster vs vector?

Affinity designer vs adobe illustrator and photoshop