Photoshop and InDesign

[senereeta]

I have used Photoshop and InDesign but I have CS3 now and it has everything. I am trying to figure out how to use all 3 for what they are used best for.

[Gunwhale]

Not sure this post will stay here, but I can help you out.

You'd want to use Photoshop more for photos and scanned images that you want to manipulate and mess with. Also, if you do comics, it's best for cleaning up scanned line art and coloring them. Photoshop deals with pixelated images, so you should be careful when using it to draw stuff. You really can't get the sharpest lines with Photoshop, and you'll get nasty pixelation if you try to enlarge objects.

If you're into drawing logos and other images that you want to keep sharp and crisp, use Illustrator. It deals with vector images, which are based on plot coordinates, so if you draw an object and enlarge it several times, it will still maintain its original crispness. You really don't want to use Illustrator for text layout, even though you can manipulate text in the program.

For actual book, brochure, poster layout, or anything that involves image and text, go with InDesign. It lets you set up pages for your document, and text manipulation is much, much easier. You really don't want to draw in InDesign, rather 'place' your image files from Photoshop or Illustrator. The beauty of InDesign, is that you don't have to embed those files in the document, but rather have them as links, and that helps you work on big projects without slowing everything down.

Hope that helps. There's more to all the programs, and you can probably find a lot more information by poking round the intarwebs.