What computer software is used for graphic design?

Software for Design

The best Computer Graphic Design software to date is Photoshop. Photoshop is named the best software by many and out ranks its rival, Paint Shop Pro. Photoshop has all the best tools and with a bit of time and effort, you can produce great work.

The industry standard is Adobe. There can be no arguments about that. Adobe provides us with very powerful tools. However, it does have a huge learning curve because of its power.

As graphic designers, we use each of these programs and import and export between them for individual tasks.

• Photoshop for retouching or anything to be done in RGB raster work
• Illustrator for illustration and anything in CMYK vector
• InDesign for page layouts
• Dreamweaver to put our websites together
• InCopy just for copy writing
• Premiere Pro for video editing
• EncoreDVD to put a DVD together
• After Effects for video effects
• Flash to make flash programs and animations
• Acrobat to for our documentation

These programs overlap each other also. For instance, Illustrator could also be used for single page layouts, but InDesign is better for entire books. We can create illustrations in Illustrator, but we can also produce illustrations in Photoshop. It depends on the style you want the illustration to be in, since Photoshop is raster and Illustrator is vector.

Raster vs. Vector

So what's the difference between rasters and vectors?

A "raster" is a grid of colored dots. Imagine taking a sheet of graph paper and drawing a picture by coloring in squares with colored pencils, and you've got a pretty good idea as to what a raster is. You can do a lot with rasters...what you CAN'T do is enlarge them without taking a quality hit.

A "vector" is a computer program. It is a series of commands that tell the output device, "draw an oval. Make it five feet long by two feet high, color it orange and put a black line around it." It will proceed to do just that, at the highest resolution the output device supports.

For most of you folks, the major difference between vector and raster is going to be that the files can be smaller in vector (although I've seen some massive vector files), and small type will look better in vector but you can get nicer blends in raster. My work is a bit larger...two weeks ago I did a design for a bank that went on the side of a real PT Cruiser. The finished flats were about 22 feet long. I designed it in Illustrator, and each side was 9MB. If I would have designed the same job in Photoshop, the files would have been about 600MB--and the flats wouldn't have looked as good; they wouldn't have had crisp edges. I've got some Photoshop files that are well over 1GB in size.

First answer by ID1451242460. Last edit by Jmowreader. Contributor trust: 139 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 36 [recommend question]