Computer images

Sheridan, regarding your question about Illustrator and/or
Photoshop: I think Photoshop is more suitable for working with
scanned images, photos, anything with a lot of shading or detail.
It’s capable of drawing simple line-images, but this isn’t its
main strength. Illustrator is a drawing, rather than an image
editing program, so is much better in the line/shape department,
or in manipulating text. So for enamels, you might find
Illustrator useful for playing with various cloisonne-line
possibilities, but for scanning drawings or images and playing
with color you would probably find Photoshop more useful. You
also might consider the program “Painter”. As far as playing with
color, I’m not familiar with Illustrator’s capabilities here, but
Photoshop is pretty sophistocated. I personally don’t work with
the color functions much, preferring a more hands-on approach. I
use Photoshop extensively in manipulating images for metal
etching, and the possibilities are mind-boggling. It’s necessary
to have a very high contrast image for etching, and Photoshop
gives you a lot room to create whatever balance of positive and
negative that you’re looking for in an image.

Hope this helps.

Rene