By using Photoshop, fashion designers can re-color textiles, create textile design repeats, clean scanned images, assemble CAD presentations, render sketches, add dimensional shading, and more!
Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop are two of the most commonly used CAD (Computer Aided Design) software programs in the fashion industry due to their versatility and affordability.
When used in combination with one another, these two programs provide just about all the tools an apparel designer needs to draw fashion design sketches, technical flat sketches, CAD presentations (rendered flat sketches), create and modify textile designs, repeats and colorways, design embroidery, graphic artwork, and more!
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based program, which means that artwork can be scaled and printed at any size and resolution while maintaining full detail and clarity. This aspect makes the program ideal for producing fashion flat sketches, CAD sketch presentations, fashion illustrations and other images that are commonly resized and rearranged for various presentation purposes.
Some notable advances in Illustrator make it faster and easier to create fashion sketches, CADs and other projects.
The “Live Trace” feature, introduced in CS2, allows users to easily convert photos, scans, and bitmap images into editable vector files.
Also introduced in Illustrator CS2 is the “Live Paint” feature, which enables fashion designers to fill apparel sketches with colors and patterns using only a few simple clicks.
Live Paint has completely revolutionized and simplified the way fashion designers draw and render fashion sketches, since it eliminates the need to draw closed shapes.