About drawing and painting

When creating graphics on a computer, there is a distinction between painting and drawing. Painting involves changing the colors of pixels using a painting tool. You can apply colors gradually, with soft edges and transitions, and manipulate individual pixels using powerful filter effects. However, once you apply a brush stroke, there is no simple way to select the entire brush stroke and move it to a new location in the image.

Drawing, on the other hand, involves creating shapes that are defined as geometric objects (also called vector objects). For example, if you draw a circle using the ellipse tool, the circle is defined by a specific radius, location, and color. You can quickly select the entire circle and move it to a new location, or you can edit the outline of the circle to distort its shape. (See About bitmap images and vector graphics.)

Working with shapes provides several advantages:

• Shapes are object-oriented--you can quickly select, resize, and move a shape, and you can edit a shape's outline (called a path) and attributes (such as stroke, fill color, and style). You can use shapes to make selections and create libraries of custom shapes with the Preset Manager.
• Shapes are resolution-independent--they maintain crisp edges when resized, printed to a PostScript printer, saved in a PDF file, or imported into a vector-based graphics application.