Subtitles of the Movie

Rasters versus Vectors - the age-old question. Kind of like Godzilla versus King Kong. So what's the difference between the two? Well, in Illustrator the artwork that we create is Vector-based which means that the lines are mathematically calculated, so when I click on this artwork here, this crazy dragon, you see that we have all these points here. Now, these points are not based on pixels or little boxes that you see in Photoshop. These are crisp no matter how close we zoom in which is very cool. Theoretically, we could zoom this image up to the size of the galaxy and it will be crisp. Now I haven't yet had a chance to test that theory, but I do plan to do so one day. So, as you could see here, I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to keep going until my magnifying glass can't go anymore. I'm at 6400 percent. This line is crisp. The whole illustration is just beautiful. So I'll go ahead and double-click on the Hand Tool. So, the way this works is, these points here all lie on a path and on this path we have these handles and these handles dictate how these are going to curve. So these handles here are lying tangent to the curve, alright, so whatever we do with the handles dictates how we're going to get this curve and this is mathematically calculated. Generally, your Illustrator documents will be smaller by a large factor over the size of your Photoshop documents which have tons and tons of information. So, I'm going to leave the dragon alone and we're going to head over to Photoshop where ironically there is a Godzilla. Now, for those of you guys who watch my tutorials you know that I love Godzilla. I blame Godzilla for my career. Godzilla-Star Wars, alright? I still, well, actually I have a Godzilla on my desk right now. I'm looking right at him. So, Godzilla's one of my favorite things in the world. But let's talk about zooming in on Godzilla. I'm going to go right to his eye and I'm going to zoom in. You see these little boxes here? These are pixels. Now, unlike Illustrator, when you create artwork in Photoshop the artwork is made up of all of these pixels, also known as Rasters. Pixel, by the way, is short for Picture Element and - let me move this over and we can look right into his eye - and chances are this is still not the size of his real eye. So, when we zoom in we see that we have tons of these and they vary in color so Photoshop has to keep track of where this pixel is, where this pixel is, where this one is and the colors of each one of them and this takes up a huge amount of information for Photoshop to know this, especially when you perform an operation like the Smudge. When you smudge things you're moving these guys around so Photoshop has to know where it used to be, where it is now in relationship to the other pixels and this could be quite intensive and as a little experiment what you can do to see how this would really push your system is you could try to make a gigantic Smudge Brush and try to move a whole bunch of pixels and you'll hear the fans of your computer start to whine because it takes that much calculation power. But, in Illustrator we can grab a whole bunch of the points and move them simultaneously and pretty much get no noise coming out of the computer. So that is pretty much the biggest difference between the Photoshop and Illustrator applications. One is going to give you very crisp artwork no matter how much we zoom in, the other will give us artwork that's going to eventually start to look jaggedy and, as you can see here, we have this blurring called Antialiasing that the application is going to do for us, gives us the illusion that it's a smooth line. So we have this dark pixel and this dark pixel and we have this light gray one and when we zoom all the way out our eye thinks that it's smooth. In Illustrator we don't have that problem because everything is smooth. So, if you ever have questions or if anybody ever wanted to know, you know, why choose one application over the other, well, Photoshop's going to give you a more realistic look, Illustrator's going to give you that traditional vector look where everything's nice and clean no matter what you do. However, you can take some filters inside of Illustrator and you can smooth this out, so if you check out the Special Effects section of this tutorial you'll find something where I show you how to do just that and I'll show you how to make some soft edges. So you can, indeed, get some kind of Raster artwork inside of Illustrator.