Many new designers develop an affinity for one particular program – oftentimes Photoshop – which they may have used as hobbyists before they ever began studying graphic design. While most people think that Photoshop is good for everything under the sun, its primary use in print design is for photo editing.

Did you ever wonder why Adobe Creative Suite (Standard) includes InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop? Why Corel Suite includes Corel Draw and Photopaint? Each program has specific strengths and is designed for specific uses.

Page layout: Adobe InDesign, Corel Draw, Quark XPress
Logos and vector work: Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Macromedia Freehand
Photo editing and web graphics: Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint


Logo Design

Some novice designers use Photoshop to create logos. Logos should be designed as vector graphics so that they can be scaled to any size, and printed on something as small as a pen or as large as a billboard. Graphics made in Photoshop are not scalable, so the only choice is to design at a very high resolution, and that is not ideal. It is a better option to create a logo as a vector graphic and then to take the vector file into Photoshop to add any desired raster effects to it as needed.


Page Layout

Photoshop is not capable of creating multi-page documents. Some designers attempt to work around this by creating several individual one-page files. However, Photoshop has limited text editing capabilities, and rasterized text does not print as clearly as vector text. Saving a file with multiple layers can drastically increase file sizes, making them cumbersome and difficult to transfer, but rendering a file as a flattened image eliminates your ability to edit the text (or other layers) in the future.


Web Graphics and Digital Art

While Photoshop is primarily a photo editing program, it can also be used very effectively to design web graphics and digital art. The main thing to bear in mind when creating artwork in Photoshop is to design the piece at the correct resolution for the finished size. (If you create your digital art in vector format, it can be resized without losing resolution, and for this reason some artists choose to create the base illustration as vector art and then add colors and textures in Photoshop.) Generally for printed work, a resolution of 300 ppi (pixels per inch, sometimes called dpi, or "dots per inch") at the finished size is sufficient.


In Conclusion

Photoshop is a very powerful program, but it was never intended to be an all-purpose tool. While it may seem difficult – even overwhelming – at first, it is well worth taking the time to familiarize yourself with the correct programs for the job.