Robert Levine wrote:
"Bottomline is that you're driving drive nails with a screwdriver. There are proper tools for everything and Photoshop is not the right tool for this."

Sometimes the "screwdriver" works pretty well.

I would never suggest using Photoshop by itself for all vector-drawing purposes. It's as nutty an analogy as all those Fireworks fans trying to say it's a better drawing program than Freehand.

Still, Photoshop's has some key advantages in creating vector paths.

Photoshop's pen tool has, in my opinion, better keyboard shortcuts than any other drawing program. I can manually digitize and adjust paths while still digitizing them more easily in Photoshop than I can in any other program. On top of that, the Ctrl, Alt and Spacebar keys still work for zooming and hand panning across an image while that path is being actively digitized.

Photoshop has better path to pixel registration than dedicated vector drawing programs. It also has a faster screen refresh rate -the difference on this was huge in previous software generations. AI CS2 has made the difference on refresh quite a bit closer.

What this gets down to in vector logo design is Photoshop can allow one to manually digitize "organic" types of shapes faster and better. What I mean by "organic" is scans of hand drawn or painted items or silhouettes of natural photographic items, such as a leaf.

The pen tool is mainly designed for drawing clipping paths. But those paths can also be used as logo elements. Commonly I digitize some elements within Photoshop and put together other elements in other applications and then eventually assemble it all together as a finished layout in Illustrator.

Photoshop's disadvantage to Illustrator (and more technical oriented programs) is lack of numerical control on path creation. For technical looking logos featuring more geometric shapes a dedicated draw program like Illustrator is clearly the better choice.

Jonathan_Zuck

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How to Create a Vector Image in Photoshop