Photoshop or Illustator for Professional Printing

[jatna]

My Sister wants to scan some ink drawings into an editor, color them and put some text on them. Then she wants to send the results to a professional printing company to print up cards.

Should we be doing this in Illustrator instead of Photoshop and in vector graphics? What file format should we use? What scanner?

Thanks if you know.

[thedirtyknapkin]

it depends on how you want to do it...

if you want to carefully paint in all of the details with a brush, then you want illistrator

if you want to easily select, and fill each section, then modify them to taste, you want photoshop

[sassyprint]

Photoshop is a good tool for your purpose. Depending on the printing company, you may prepare the file in EPS or TIFF.

[xtrme]

Epson makes good scanners. Their perfection photo scanner series would work well for what you're doing; I'd go with $150 - $200 price range, more if your budget allows.

Photoshop will work well for the workflow you describe. Most printers these days prefer pdf's so make sure you understand how to save a pdf from Photoshop (some versions of Photoshop can be a little buggy when saving pdf's).

Make sure you contact the printer before you start and ask for specs, especially whether they accept rgb files (most don't). If they only accept cmyk (or convert rgb to cmyk themselves) then you should set up your documents as cmyk to begin with so you don't get any colour surprises later.

[printchesco]

Photoshop is best for your purpose. If you are sending the files to a printing company, you better ask first what file format is acceptable although TIFF is a safe bet.

[sassyprint]

I've heard that illustrator is best for designing things that would eventually be printed out. There are fewer problems with scaling that way.

[Hoogle]

for best results illustrator will give you better edges however photoshop cs6 has great improvement on vector art than previous versions.

for ease of use I would choose photoshop it is easier to get to grips with and you have the added bonus of exporting it as an illustrator file if that is what is needed for print.

Honestly though if your budget allows you to then I would go for both I often program hop between the 2 when doing things I am sure everything I hop to a different program for is available in both but I guess if you know how to do something easily in 1 I choose to do that.