The name photoshop is also a term used to describe the digital 'airbrushing' of photographs; whilst photoshop can be used to do this, it can do FAR more.

Because Photoshop is the industry defining software all of those alternative softwares follow similar approaches, use similar tools and offer similar options - this means that learning about photoshop opens the door to most of them.

Also, as you learn about Photoshop, you will gain a better idea of what you need your software to do, should you explore those alternatives you'll know what to look for.

You don't need to worry about what this technically means (feel free to google it if you need to know or enjoy being confused).

Bitmap editors are great at some things - and we'll look at those in a minute - but they're also really bad at other things. This is why understanding what Photoshop is is important - so you use it when it's the right tool and not when it isn't.

If you each received the same package of creative tools, you would use them slightly (or vastly) differently. You might even find novel ways of using tools that no one else has thought of in order to create unique outcomes. Every art tools has been creatied for a specific purpose, but we all know it's fun to find our own ways of using them too.

This is Photoshop.

Ask a group of photoshop users how to carry out a simple task and you'll receive a slightly (or vastly) different answer from each because they've each taken ownership of their toolkit and learned how to use it slightly differently.

Well I'm here to tell you not to worry.

As with any toolkit, you only use the tools for the job.

This image is what Photoshop looked like to me at first.

(Bonus points for naming the plane)

Because Photoshop works with individual pixels, it is good at creating or working with images that contain huge amounts of complex information (including photographs). This means it is good at

• Realism

• Texture

• Depth

• Fidelity of colour

Because of how images are stored in photoshop, it is not good for producing work which may need to be resized after production (specifically enlarged).

Here's a simple example:

Imagine that you use photoshop to produce a logo for your friend's art organisation. It has to be displayed onscreen and maybe on the printed invoices. Great. You produce a logo 3cm by 3cm...

You've got no option but to recreate the work again - but a bit bigger. What a pain!

The square on the right represents those 4 pixels enlarged in Photoshop by 200% - 4 pixels becomes 16.

This means that with 4 original pixels, Photoshop has had to 'make up' 12. There is more 'false' information than 'true' information.

You'll notice that the sharp definition between black and white has been lost. Photoshop has used an algorithm to make it's best guess, based on the original content, at how to trick our eyes.

If you've ever printed an image off of the web and it's looked pixelated and blurred, this is why.

Caveat:

The algorithms that Photoshop uses to enlarge or shrink images have improved and continue to improve. Some enlarging is ok. To what amount depends on your original image. As a rule of thumb though, if your image has clean definition, strong edges etc, avoid. If you're working with tone and texture, you might get away with something like 20-30%.

Adobe will almost certainly begin to use AI in this area of photoshop. At the moment the scaling algorithms all use the information contained within your image, but it's likely that they will soon be using information from elsewhere to 'learn' what your image contains and to better predict the new information needed. strange times.

Not only can these large files push your PC to its limits, they also take up a lot of storage and can be slow to pass across sharing platforms.

All of these issues have been made less problematic by improvements to hardware over the years, but limitations are still evident.

The two are not interchangeable. They specialise in different things and have different purposes.

Broadly speaking, everything that I have described photoshop as being good at, illustrator is bad at.

Everything I have described Photoshop as being bad at, Illustrator specialises in.

Designing a logo? Illustrator is the tool for you as the output artwork can be rescaled to absolutely any size without the slightest alteration to image quality

Where a photoshop file might be hundreds of Megabytes or even Gigabytes in size, an illustrator file will be Kilobytes. An average PC shouldn't have any issue with an illustrator file.

Again, broadly speaking, Photoshop images might not look digital - they might be photographic or digitally painted to mimic real world artefacts. Illustrator files have the clean and precise look of digital imagery (as illustrator advances, it grows texture and other 'real world' aesthetic capabilities but these do not come close to 'real' or 'photographic'.

Speaking very broadly though, we can categories Photoshop's use into 3 distinct areas.

1. Working on images that are generated outside of Photoshop - 'airbrushing' photos for publication. Tweaking colour and tone values of photographs or scanned work.

2. Working on images that are a mix of digital and analogue. Bringing 'real world artefacts' into a digital sphere in order to create work which is a mix of both.

3. Working on images that are entirely digital. These may appear cleanly digital or they may ape traditional analogue image making processes.

Let's look at some examples of these 3 categories.

For example this image consists of 4 separate drawings of the cyclists whilst the clouds, sky and greenery are all made from a single ink mark that has been repeated. All components were created in black ink and coloured digitally in photoshop. There is no 'original' image of this illustration.

At one point he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year simply from selling the digital brushes that he made. He now works for Adobe and his brushes are exclusively available through Photoshop.

Making brushes in photoshop isn't hard - it's relatively easy to important textures or other ephemera and turn them into usable brushes - making GOOD brushes that emulate real world materials isn't so easy and it's obvious Webster has built a lot of technical know-how to achieve what he achieves.

Put simply, photoshop is good if you know the size at which you want to use or reproduce the work you're creating. If the work might need to be used at various sizes (like a logo) - it's no good. For that you'll need a 'vector' image editor such as Adobe Illustrator.

When he began getting work in the world of concept art for film and TV, he realised that working in paint was a disadvantage - it took too long and meant lugging his materials around from studio to studio - often all over the world. Photoshop was the answer (far easier to pack a laptop and tablet than a full artist's studio).

Using his understanding of paint, application and colour theory - not to mention world class draughtsmanship - Power has spent the last 20 years becoming one of the most in-demand and respected concept artists working. The following are all digital...