Subtitles of the Movie

To start off this lesson I'm going to be in Adobe Photoshop. I'm going to go to file open. And in your work files folder, if you would like to follow along, open up raster vs. vector.psd and hit open. And we have here a fairly simple Photoshop file. It just says raster on the column of the left and vector on the column on the right. Now raster and vector are two terms that you here tossed around a lot in the graphics world. It's absolutely vital that you understand what they mean and the difference between the two. And I'm going to demonstrate the difference but essentially in a nutshell here's what the difference is. Raster means and object that is created with pixels - little squares that are the building blocks of many images. Vector objects are created with math. Let me show you how this works. Under the raster column I'm going to make a teeny tiny raster circle. We can make a new layer. I'm going to fill this with a color. Actually just go ahead and select this brown color here. Hit ok. I'm going to hit Alt backspace to fill this layer with the foreground color. Now I'm going to select a new layer here. I'm going to hit Ctrl D to deselect that. that is Command D on the Mac. And I'm going to make a circle the same size but I'm going to make it vector. It's a little bit smaller but that works. Now so far there is no difference visually between the raster circle and the vector circle. Well keep in mind that raster means made with pixels. As I zoom in here you'll see that there are several little squares that are actually making up this circle. And again, that's exactly what raster means. But the problem is, is that it's finite. That circle is make up of only so many pixels. We can really make that much bigger because there's not that many pixels there. but again, the vector circle is made using mathematical formulas. So scaling that up is essentially just scaling up the math. Let me show you how this works in the real world. I'm going to select layer one. I'm going to hit Ctrl T or Command T on the Mac to get the free transform bounding box here. I'm going to select a corner. Again, I'm going to hold Shift to constrain the proportions. And I'm actually going to also hold Alt simultaneously to scale it from the center point. That looks good. And I'm going to hit Enter on the numeric keypad to accept it. Eww look at that. That's disgusting! What happened is our circle ran out of pixels. This doesn't look good. Let's do the same thing to our vector circle. I'm going to select it, hit Ctrl T or Command T on the Mac, scale it up using Shift and Alt. Let's make it even bigger. Hit Enter on the numeric keypad. Deactivate the path by clicking its vector mask thumbnail here in the layers pallet. Look at that. Razor sharp. Razor sharp edges. Because again, the vector shape is using math. The raster shape has to use pixels only. Now Photoshop primarily is a raster based program. It feels most at home with pixels. However, as you can see, we've been using vector shapes for our example here. So Photoshop does have some powerful vector capabilities as well. Illustrator is the opposite. It is primarily vector based. It has a few kind of weak raster functions as well. Now at this point in the game a lot of my students often ask, "well then why don't we make everything vector?" Well in order to create the math that is involved it's actually significantly more complicated than just drawing a circle. As I activate this shape and select it here with the past selection tool. You'll see that it's a series of anchor point and segments. Well those are pretty easy to see and probably not that hard to create from scratch. What if your creating a photo of a sunset with millions of colors involved? Well then it's not quite so easy to use these vector shapes. So raster and vector both have their time and their place. For photos you almost always want to use raster tools to edit them. For vector shapes like logos and things that need to scale up infinitely, we would use vector editing tools like Illustrator. But again, that is the power of vector stuff. If you have something that is very small, say for example you designed a logo or text for a business card. If it's raster and your going to make it bigger for a brochure or even a billboard it's going to look hideous. If you set it up correctly and it's vector then you can scale up that same business card size logo to the size of, I don't know, east Los Angeles and it's still going to be perfect quality. Now for the rest of this training series I'm going to be tossing around those terms; raster and vector without explanation. So you might need to rewind this segment and watch it again to make sure that you understand these concepts. Now this ends all the intro stuff. We're now ready to actually open up Photoshop and start learning Photoshop. Enough with the intro stuff.