OT: Which should we purchase, PhotoShop or Illustrator

[Mark Barratt]

Cris Reeser wrote:
> Does anyone in the group have experience with either of these tools? My
> writing group is planning to buy either PhotoShop or Illustrator. We
> need a tool to edit graphics that have been added to PowerPoint or
> MSWord files. 
> 

I have used both since version 1.0 and can't imagine being without 
either - and I'm not an illustrator.

> We get PowerPoint slides to edit and clean up for delivery. In places,
> artwork has been pasted into the slide, but contains white boxes that
> cover bits of the drawing or text. This method doesn't work in grayscale
> because the hidden lines or text show up again. 
> 
> We need a tool that lets us remove text in the graphics where we do not
> have the source file.
> 

Illustrator is mainly a vector-art editing program, while Photoshop 
concentrates in pixel-based images.

Illustrator will probably do the job for you: if you have Acrobat you 
can make an Acrobat from PowerPoint and edit it in Illustrator, usually 
with surprisingly good results.

If your bosses can afford it, I'd get them to spring for the Adobe CS2 
suite which includes both, plus InDesign (so you can practice for the 
next or next-but-one FrameMaker). The Pro version includes Acrobat Pro, 
which you may already have, and GoLive, an (IMHO) useless web-design tool.

If they worry about the spend, the best combo is probably Illustrator 
CS2 plus Photoshop Elements - a cheap cut-down version of Photoshop that 
doesn't do CMYK, just RGB, but is very cheap and very good at what it 
does do.

best

-- 
Mark Barratt
Text Matters

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