Real World Adobe® Illustrator® CS5

10. Working with Images

There’s no velvet rope barring entry to the Illustrator exclusive vector graphics club. Pixels are always welcome inside. In fact, you’ve already learned how certain live effects use pixels to produce their appearance. In Illustrator, vectors and pixels peacefully coexist, and you can benefit by combining both vectors and pixels (such as adding a soft drop shadow to text). You shouldn’t feel you have to choose only one graphic type or the other.

Although Illustrator does have the ability to support pixels in some ways (as you’ll see throughout this chapter), it in no way replaces the need for applications such as Photoshop. ...