Transcript:
[MUSIC] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davie’s media design. My name is Michael Davies. And in today’s tutorial, I’ll be comparing three important features found in both Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape. But of course, before I get into that, I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies Media Designcom as always, we have tons of and Inkscape tutorials on here as well as and Inkscape help articles, so definitely check that out. You can also support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and get some awesome and Inkscape extras in return and I’ll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video. So the reason I am performing. The comparison between the three different features found in both illustrator and Inkscape is really just to demonstrate that a lot of stuff is possible within Inkscape, even though it is a free, scalable vector graphics program, whereas illustrator, of course, comes with the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and therefore is a premium piece of software. That’s going to cost you depending on where you live. And what kind of Creative Cloud package you have anywhere between 10 20 and 60 dollars. I believe per month the more common being $60 per month, coming with the entire Creative Cloud suite, but both of these programs use scalable vector graphics, Adobe Illustrator being, of course, the industry, standard and Inkscape just being an open source free version alternative. For those of you who don’t want to spend that money? I’ll dive in with the first comparison here, and that is going to be between the art board found in Illustrator and the canvas found in Inkscape now. I want to show you how when you first open the programs, each one differs in terms of setting up a new document and how to change a document and some of the features found in the document properties. So I’m going to start here with illustrator and we’ll start by opening up that program. So come over here to my search box and I’m going to type in illustrator and just click to open this app on my computer. All right, so here is the latest version of Adobe Illustrator from Creative Cloud. And, Of course, the main thing you see when you first open illustrator is going to be this welcome screen and you have the ability to open up a file that says, start a new file fast. These are based on commonly used templates and you can see these have different units involved, so we’ve got points here. We’ve got pixels here. You can also just come over here and create a new document or a new artboard using your own custom settings, so whatever settings you want to set up here if I hit create new Ill. Just show you guys. This is what pops up here, so you can set the name of your document. The width and height, the units, whether it’s landscape or portrait and a bleed area. If you’re using this for prints, you can also set the number of artboards here, and I think this is the main difference between Illustrator and Inkscape. Which is that illustrator allows you to have multiple artboards open within the same document or the same composition, and this is really useful whenever you’re trying to create a seamless piece of work, Maybe you have, you know, five artboards and you want the art to sort of seamlessly go from one of the artboards to the next and by the way for those of you who aren’t familiar with the artboard concept in illustrator, artboards are essentially canvases, so you can have multiple canvases in one single composition and let’s say you have five canvases. You can export those as a document that has five different documents in it, so this is just a great way to create some coordinated work. Some seamless work. Have your art just carry over from one to the next, and that is something that is not found in Inkscape. We’ll get into that in a second here. I can have multiple artboards on here, really, as many as I want, but for now, I’m just going to hit close because I don’t want to actually create a new document. I’m going to instead use the letter template here just to demonstrate some of the differences between illustrator and Inkscape, so I’ll click on the letter template here and this will automatically open up a brand new document so here. I have my artboard. This is a single artboard. And when it comes to editing your artboard in illustrator, you have what’s called the artboard tool, so this makes it super easy to edit your artboard and I swear I’m not trying to sell you guys on illustrator. I’m actually probably more so trying to sell you one Inkscape. But I think that illustrator does have some better features at this time, so I do think it’s important to point that out, but if I come over here, you’ll see we have the artboard tool, so you can hit shift O to open that. And when you click the artboard key, you’ll see over here in the properties panel. We actually have artboard popped up here. You can exit out of the artboard tool and the reason. I’m doing that is that there’s actually an edit artboard’s button here as well and that’s going to take you to the same area so that will also open up the artboard tool, and you also have the command’s panel up top here, and so you have the properties panel in the command’s panel from either one of these sections. You can adjust the size of your current artboard, so let’s say, for example. I want to make this a little bit wider, so I can type 800 points here. That’ll widen that up and maybe I’m just coming up with random numbers. I can type a thousand there and I can use my zoom tool holding the Alt key to zoom out a little bit, So there’s our new document, and, of course I can come back to the artboard tool and I could do the same thing over here, so I can change the width and the height. I can make sure that the aspect ratio is maintained here, so the proportions by either turning this on. So we have a chain-link icon. That’s going to ensure that no matter what change. I make to this, so let’s say I change this to a thousand. This height is going to update automatically in order to keep the original aspect ratio. I can also come over here and name my artboard so right now, it says Artboard 1 So let’s say I put this as Mike’s artboard and yes. I know that grammar is incorrect. There, so now we have a new artboard name for this and we’ll just keep the preset set to custom, and I can also come over here and click to create a new artboard. So if I click this icon, Mike’s artboard is now Artboard 1 over here. If I scroll over, you can see This is labeled Mike’s artboard and then if I come over here, Artboard 2 is going to be our brand new artboard so again. This is a huge advantage with illustrator over Inkscape the ability to have multiple artboards in the same composition and be able to create sort of coordinated works of art. And I’m actually going to come over here and just delete the second artboard here. We also have the artboard options. So if I click on that, you can see. We have a few more options in here for the artboard. I’m not going to go into that in this tutorial, but just know that’s there if you are an illustrator user, so, hey, cancel. There’s actually one last feature. I want to show you guys with the illustrator Artboard before I move on to Inkscape scan the feature and that is the ability to freehand. Draw your artboard’s using this artboard tool. So let’s say you have the first artboard here as you could see. You want to draw a second artboard. It’s just free, handing it with your mouse. Well, with the artboard tool selected, you can just click and drag your mouse, and now you can see your second. Artboard here is going to show up based on, however, you drew it so you can draw it like this. You know, draw it over here. You can see that all. These artboards are just being added here, and of course we can go in and just click on the artboard and delete those If we decide we don’t want to keep them. All right, Let’s move on to the Inkscape canvas system and for starters. The main difference here out of the gate is going to be when you first open. Inkscape it’s just going to open it up into a new document, so if I come over here and type in Inkscape and just click on the Inkscape app that is going to open up a brand new Inkscape window. And if I hold ctrl and zoom out with my mouse wheel, you’ll see here is our first. Inkscape canvas, our default canvas. So this is opening this up based on whatever default. You have set up for your Inkscape and I do have a tutorial on how to make your. Inkscape canvas look like illustrators artboard. That’s what I’ve done here. That’s why we have the dark grey background, and we have the white canvas. I’ve actually set this up custom so that it looks like this. And if I minimize this and show you illustrator, you can see the two are very similar. Your document might look a little bit different than mine. If you haven’t followed that tutorial yet, but we’re gonna edit the document properties here, and it’s a little bit different in Inkscape, of course than illustrator, the main difference being that we do not have an artboard tool, so what we have to do Is we have to open up the document properties dialog, and there’s two ways we can do that. We can do it through the file menu by going to file document properties or using the shift, ctrl. D Shortcut key and the second method is to come over here and you can see. We have the Edit properties of this document icon, So if I click on that that is going to bring up my document properties dialog, so this is essentially the equivalent to Adobe Illustrator’s Artboard tool, but an Inkscape there are two main differences here between ink escapes document properties dialog in the artboard tool. The first difference is that you cannot draw, of course, more than one canvas at a time single composition in Inkscape and number two is that you cannot freehand draw a canvas and Inkscape like you can do with the artboard tool in Illustrator, But what you can do is you can choose from a series of templates much like you could do in that. Welcome screen in Adobe Illustrator. So in this case, I can go with a page size of an a4 document. This is actually what the default page size is set up as for first time. Inkscape users so you can see this automatically changes the width and the height and the reason there was no change happening over here is because I do have two layers over here from my custom setup. So if I just hide both of those custom layers here now you can see This is our actual document, so I can choose from a series of templates here and right now I have this set to landscape mode. I could change it to portrait mode. I can also set up a custom size for this document much like I can do in Illustrator and I could set up the units and we have two sets of units here. We have display units, which is going to be what’s shown here in the rulers, and we have the units for the actual document itself, and this is just going to determine the size that you see right here. I’ll skip over the scale box for now, just for the sake of time, but you do also have the ability to edit your background and so right now I have this set up to have a background color similar to what Adobe Illustrator uses. I can click on that and change that to something like white, so this is starting to get similar to what your Inkscape looks like. I can close that out. I can also have this set up so that the border shows on top of the drawing, which is what I prefer and I can have this so that the border around the canvas has a small shadow like that. So that’s how Inkscape comes by default. I personally don’t like the look of this because I am used to illustrator, but this is how your Escape is going to look by default. And now you see how you can go in here and just change this to whatever you want. Once you’re finished editing this, you just close out the document properties and your changes will take effect, so you’ll remember that with Adobe’s artboard, you can create a brand new artboard and that’s just going to add that artboard next to the original one. In this case, we cannot create a new canvas, although we can create a brand new document and to do that, we come over here and we can either Click this icon here, which says create new document from the default template. Or you can go to file new, and if I click on that that will open up a brand new Inkscape window and I can hold control and zoom out and this is just going to create a brand new document using my default custom canvas settings that I set up earlier. Alright, so that was our first comparison. The second thing I want to compare here is the way the colors are set up, so in illustrator, you have a few different panels. You have the colors panel, the color guides panel and the swatches panel and in Inkscape, you have the color pallet bar at the bottom of your Inkscape window as well as the fill and Stroke dialog box or the fill and stroke panel, So I’m going to start with Adobe’s color panels, and I’m gonna minimize Inkscape here, so we have two windows open. I just have to minimize both of those and let me come over and grab my select tool here. So if I come over to the right side of my artboard, you’ll see we have a series of icons here, and this is going to be your panel’s section. So the first panel here is the color panel, and this allows you to select any color from whatever spectrum you currently have selected in this case. I have CMYK setup right now as my color space, and there’s a little menu right here, so you could choose from any of these color spaces, and so when I hover my mouse over this and reveal the eyedropper tool, you’ll see, it, says CMYK spectrum there, and of course I can click and drag my mouse around and over here, you’ll see my foreground color changing as I do that. And if I hold the Alt key and click on here, you’ll see that the same will happen, but for my stroke color, so I call this my foreground color. This is actually the fill color. This is the stroke color. You also have. The option appear to select none black or white as your color. So this is again for either your fill or your stroke colors, but I’m going to just select maybe, like a bluish color here, so the next panel, which I think is actually the best feature found in Illustrator, is going to be the color guide panel. And if I come over here, I can click on that color. Guide panel directly from the color panel. So it’s just another tab over or I can come down here in my panel’s section and click on the color guide icon And so what we have here is. We have our main fill color that’s selected so right, now it’s going to be this blue color and so the right of that we have again the fill color and then for other colors that match that blue color based on what’s called a harmony rule, so what this is doing essentially is, it’s taking whatever color you have active, so it can be the fill or the stroke color and it’s setting up in colors or color schemes based on certain color theory. So if I clicked on this drop down here, you’ll see we have various harmony rules or basically, color theory, so we have complimentary split complementary, analogous shades. All of these are going to produce different color sets, depending on that harmony rule. So this one, for example, is giving you a really nice color scheme between blue and Brown, which are going to be complementary colors on the color wheel, and because this is a lighter blue, we get like lighter. Brown’s in here and so all of these colors here in the middle are going to be your main colors and then to the left of that. You have color shades going, basically, all the way to a really dark color or almost a black color and to the right of that you have tints, so that’s going to just go into lighter versions of that color. Of course, there are some other features down here, which I’m not going to go into for the sake of this tutorial, but if I come over here and I just switch my active color to the stroke color, that’ll bring me back over here to the color panel, and if I click on the color guide now. All of my colors are based on my stroke color and the final panel that has to do with colors in Illustrator is going to be the swatche’s panel. So that’s going to be the third one right here. The third icon and this just gives you the ability to pick a single color Swatch in here and so by default, it has a bunch of random colors, and it also has from black to white and all of the transition colors in between which are going to be various shades of grey, and we’ve also got some common colors here, which are basically like primary colors and colors of the rainbow. You can also come down here and choose from some default colors that come with the illustrator library and that includes things like gradients and just other color swatches or where color sets in general, of course, users can create their own swatches as well if they want to come up with their own custom Swatch. So that is going to be for the most part colors in Illustrator, especially the color guide is what I want to focus on here because I think that is the most important feature that again is the second icon here. So those of you who are current illustrator users or have used illustrator in the past are very familiar with these color features. Of course, This doesn’t cover everything in Illustrator. There are some other things found in here that I didn’t go over, but now I’m going to jump over to Inkscape. So how does Inkscape sculler system or whatever you want to call it compared to illustrators? Well, if I come over and minimize illustrator, and then I’m gonna bring up Inkscape again, lets. Just go with this new document here that looks similar to illustrators artboard. So again, This is the Inkscape canvas. Something that really stands out to brand new users in Inkscape is the fact that it has a color palette bar here at the bottom, and this can be kind of off-putting at first because it almost looks like there’s only I don’t know 120 or so colors down here to choose from so it looks like you have some severe limitations when it comes to choosing colors, but in fact, you can use the scroll bar here and scroll over, and you really have probably about 6 or 700 colors that you could choose from and so you’ve got again that transition from black to white, just like illustrator had. You’ve got some primary colors and colors of the rainbow in here or just common colors, and you’ve got various colors that start with a shade to the left and go over to a tint on the right, and then you’ve got a color in the middle here, so that’s very similar to the color guide found in Illustrator, it’s just a different set up, and it’s not based on harmony rules or certain color theories, so it’s not quite as precise of a feature when it comes to choosing coordinated colors, but it still gets the job done and gives you a wide variety of colors to choose from and just like in Illustrator swatches panel. You have a menu over here. It’s like a little triangle menu. So when I click on that, there are some default color palettes that you can choose from in here as well as the ability to upload, use your color palettes, so this one right here is actually a user color palette. It’s only got, like 6 colors in it, but as you can see, you can change the color palette down here at the bottom, the color palette bar and I’ll come back here to the Inkscape default and one thing I did want to point out is like in illustrator. Also, you can select none as your fill or your stroke color and the other color option here in Inkscape is going to be your fill and Stroke dialog, So I already have that. Open over here, but you can open this by coming over to object, fill in stroke. So when I click that option, that’s going to bring up my fill and Stroke dialog and let me just close out my layers dialog, cuz. I don’t need that now. It can be confusing the first time users because currently it just has no objects in here, and that’s because I don’t have anything drawn on the canvas. So let me just draw a simple shape here, so I’ll draw a rectangle and I’ll just click and drag this and right now. The colors are based on a previous rectangle. I drew so if I wanted to change the color, I can either just click down here on my color palette bar and you just click to change the fill color, and you shift-click to change the stroke color and you can see what your current fill and stroke colors are as well as the current thickness of the stroke. So right, now this is set to 5 pixels. You’ll also notice, though over here in my fill and stroke area, we have our current color setup and you could choose from a variety of color spaces in here as well, so you have. RGB, which stands for red green blue. And then you have the Alpha Channel, which is going to be your transparency. So if I drag the Alpha Channel down, you’ll see that I’ll just make it more or less transparent or opaque. You also down here. Have the hex code, followed by two characters, which is going to represent the Alpha. So those two characters will change depending on what I have the Alpha set to here as you can see. So RGB is the first one, the next ones HSL or hue saturation lightness, and, of course, an alpha channel again. Cmyk is going to be cyan, magenta, yellow, black and Alpha. Then you can choose from a color wheel and this just allows you to randomly pick a color on the color wheel. Much like illustrator has with that color panel. And then you have CMS, which is going to be an uploaded color profile. I’m not going to go into that for this tutorial, but you do have tons of options here. You can also come up and add a gradient to this just by clicking one of these icons, so you have a linear gradient, You have a radial gradient, and, of course, experienced illustrator users know that you can add gradients in Illustrator as well, but I think the main feature here that Inkscape actually has over illustrator is the ability to add gradients in the stroke of an object, So right, now we are in the fill section, so everything we’re doing is affecting the fill, But if I come over here to my stroke paint option, everything that I do will affect the stroke and I can actually add a gradient inside of the stroke here, which is actually not something you can do in illustrate. I’m not gonna get too much into editing gradients right now, for the sake of time, so let me just change back over to a flat color, but going back to the fill option. I also have a few other options here, including a mesh gradient, which is another feature in Illustrator, or you can add a pattern in here. You also have a Swatch option and an unsent option, But I’m just gonna come back here to my flat color option and let’s go with maybe a lighter blue in here, so we can use the color wheel to select a lighter blue and, of course. I can come down here shift. Click on a color from here as well and that allows me to add a stroke and I can come over to the stroke style, and this allows me to adjust the size of my stroke. So let me go with 10 for this. So in summary, there are a ton of color options found inside of Inkscape more than meets the eye. When you first open the program, they may not be as good as illustrator’s, color options, including that color guide panel, but they are very sufficient, especially since this is a free program, the third and final comparison. I want to make between these two programs is going to be the shape builder tool as it’s called an illustrator and Inkscape. You just use the path’s menu. But both of these do have the ability to combine or break apart shapes. So let me start with illustrator. I’ll just minimize this and open illustrator back up here, and so I’ll just start by drawing a rectangle and it’s gonna have the settings that I have set up down here. Of course I can change the stroke up here. Let’s change it to ten, and I’m going to click and hold on here and just choose the ellipse tool and click and drag and draw an ellipse and let me just invert the color so we can differentiate a little bit better between the two. So now if I grab my select tool, I can click and drag, and that’ll allow me to select both of these shapes and then over here in my tool box. I have the shape builder tool right here. You might have to click and hold to access this, but usually it’s the first tool that’s going to show up, so here’s my shape builder tool and over here in the properties panel, you can see, we also have something called the Pathfinder, and I’m gonna go over that in a second, but let me just get rid of the color guide here. So with the shape builder tool, I can hover over different regions of my shapes, and that’s just going to create this sort of selection area looking thing, and that’s just showing you What area of the shape region that? I have selected right now so you can see. The program is recognizing that these shapes are intersecting. And so this is an intersection point right here to the left. Then there’s the middle section. And then there is the outer region that is outside of this intersecting area right here, so to break down the shape builder tool into its simplest forms. There are two things you can do with this tool. You can either extract or you can merge shapes together, And so if I wanted to extract, all I have to do is just click on the shape area that I want to extract so the region. I want to extract so now. This region is separate and if I click on this region as well and then click on this one and then grab my selection tool you can see once. I click off these shapes. I can now move. These shapes apart and these are now three separate regions. I’ll hold Ctrl Z and just back up a little bit. So another option I have is I can merge regions together and to do that. All I have to do is click and drag my mouse across the regions. I want to merge so I can merge all three of these together. And now this is one solid shape, so I’ll hit control Z. Of course, I can just merge these two regions together, and when I grab my selection tool and move these apart now, this one has a little chunk taken out of it, so that’s another option and, Lastly, let’s get into the Pathfinder features, so this is going to perform a similar function, except it’s more of like a quick access. One click function here so you can see when you hover over what these do so you can click to unite these shapes, which is just going to merge the shapes together. I’ll hit control Z. You can click to – the front, so whatever the front shape is which in this case is the circle that will disappear and it’ll cut out that shape here from the back shape, so they control. Z, you can choose the intersecting part of the shape. So if I click on that now, we get the intersection and I like control Z, or you can choose the click to exclude option and that is going to take out the middle chunk here where they intersect and leave us with the single shape. All right, so those are the shape features found inside of Illustrator, the shape builder tool being probably the second most important feature in my opinion in illustrator, at least for beginner designers So now let’s minimize our illustrator window here and open. Inkscape up so well. Just go with this window here, so we have one shape drawn already. Let me just grab my circle tool and draw a second shape and I’m going to click to change my fill color to red and shift Click to change the stroke color to blue. So this is a similar setup to what we had in Illustrator. So I have my selection tool here. I can click and drag to select both of these. You do just have to make sure that you click and drag over the entire shape. Otherwise it won’t work so I can just click and drag to select these, or, of course, I can shift click and click on both of these that will also select both shapes and let me just change the fill and Stroke option here to fill, so there isn’t a shape builder tool that’s available in Inkscape, but you do have the path menu and that’s going to allow you to perform some of these same functions as was performed in Illustrator, so you can merge or extract these shapes, so come over here to path and first, let me just convert both of these objects, so that’s what these shapes are. They’re objects to paths, so I’ll convert both of these objects to paths and then I’ll come over here and go to path, and now you can see. We have some options here, including Union difference, intersection exclusion division cut paths and then down here, we also have combine and break apart, so these are very similar to the Pathfinder features that we had in Illustrator. So if I come up here and click on Union, you’ll see this will create a union between our two shapes, and now this is a single shape, so hit Ctrl Z and undo that and let me just select both of these again and one thing I will say is that Inkscape can be a little glitchy so you can see that when I undid that action. These shape did not really return to what it was supposed to return to. It’s still here. It’s just that sometimes the display gets a little bit glitchy, and it takes a second for it to return. So as you can see, it’s now returned to the way it’s supposed to look, so let me click and drag and select both of these. You can also go to path difference and that’s basically going to be the same as the minus front feature and you can go to path intersection. That’ll keep that middle part path exclusion will take away the middle part there path division is going to get rid of the front object, but it’s going to keep the part that intersected with the back object, and if I click on that little chunk, you can see now. It’s its own separate shape here and I can go to path cut path and basically what that’s done is it’s taken the front object and it sliced the back object wherever the front object intersected it, so I can now break apart This little portion here that got cut out, and because this is now just a stroke it no longer has a fill. Let me just undo that, So the last feature. I’ll go over with the shapes here in Inkscape is that you have the ability to combine or break apart multiple shapes, So if I highlight both of these shapes here with the selection tool and go to paths combined, you’ll see that these two paths will now combine together to form a single path or a single shape and it’ll take on the characteristics of one of our shapes here. So now the fill and Stroke for both of these are the same and you can see. I’m getting a little bit glitchy here, but I can also break these apart again at a later time. So let’s say I draw some other shapes and then I come back here and I want to break these apart now. I don’t have to hit the undo key Ctrl Z to break these apart. Let me get control. Y to redo that. I can actually just come back here to path break apart. And now these two objects have been broken apart again. The main thing you want to note here when you do, this. Is that the style that your second shape took on when you did. The combined feature will remain with that shape. It will not revert back to the original style, so keep that in mind. Sometimes it’s better to just group objects together by selecting both and hitting the shift or sorry Ctrl G key, and that will group your objects together and keep all the styles the same, so definitely keep that in mind when using this feature, so that’s it for this tutorial, comparing three important features found in both illustrator and Inkscape. Hopefully you liked it if you did. You could check out any of my resources in the description of the video. Otherwise you could subscribe to my channel and don’t forget to click the bell to be alerted anytime. We have a new tutorial, but thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time.