I know urban and lansdcape architects that use illustrator for competitions or just to put a the general idea on paper. Most things in illustrator you can do in photoshop, so I guess photoshop for design doesn't sound crazy at all.

Is is not a bit like asking DESIGN WITH PENCIL?

:D

all the time, at least before i started using rhino and sketchup.
that did not really require a thread title in caps, did it?

CAPS...'s like the voice of god, ennit...

designin with photoshop is very cool. i often use it to sketch over digi-photos, cuz its super fast and looks good. dat sofware has come a long way, baby.

ok, but isn't there something wrong with this? i have professors who would shoot me if i told them this.

what u mean is wrong? you have an idea, you communicate it, the media u use is not to be judged on a moral scale, i mean, c'mon...

archicad bad, autocad good?

what u mean is wrong? you have an idea, you communicate it, the media u use is not to be judged on a moral scale, i mean, c'mon...

archicad bad, autocad good?

we are obviously limited by our tools, ja? god knows you can tell when you look at a building that is designed purely in autocad. those acute enough can even tell now what 3-D program must have produced the paper architecture.

when you design in photoshop during an intense competition there can be issues about making your building look like the image at the end of the day.

our job as intelligent arci-people is to not let a tool (ie photoshop) define our ideas.

my point is that i recently found out that several dutch firms in particular rely on the photoshop image. I never realized photoshop became one of these tools that we design with, and not just illusrtate in.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "design" with photoshop.

i recently found out that several dutch firms in particular rely on the photoshop image

does this mean that the images are photographs collaged in photoshop, I mean you could do that without a computer too, basically ps just let's you do it quicker (potentially), more realistically, and on the computer.

well pencrush, close but not quite just collaging--- imagine making the final rendering in photoshop complete with detail without even making a physical model or computer model. photoshop is actually being used in this situtaion as the tool to create the inital design proposal of the architecture-- not to illustrate it.

signum--maybe photoshop is the new pencil.

so I still don't understand what the problem is. I also don't understand your distinction between "illustrating" the initial idea and "creating" it. I'm assuming people are still using their brains to come up with the idea, and if they want to represent that idea with a pen and paper or a mouse and the screen, what's the problem?


I think most people still sketch out something first, just because it's a quicker way to organize their thoughts and try out variations or different ideas. I don't know how you could know if a firm did their intial work in ps or not, unless you are standing over the person's shoulder while they're creating something on the computer.

Can you post an image or an example of these projects you're talking about?

to design in photoshop is very casual. it is designing a building from (or 'for') a perspective. the sexy image rules all at the end of the day-- but how many buildings can/will/should ever look like their seductive view?

ps is a tool like any other. thassit.

i think the problem is the interative process. if you're trying to design and want to tweak and go back and retweak things, photoshop is less than ideal.

scalability is an issue. as is editing as things are not object oriented but pixel based. as said before, photoshop is like a pencil in many ways. it can do a lot but you don't take full advantage of the editing capabilities that a computer affords you when doing drawings.

indeed center. i don't understand why someone would want to do it, but whatever rocks your world.

photoshop is great for iterations of design. layers and sets allow easy switching from one option to another, etc. that it isn't a vector based system never bothers me.

agree with pencrush. who cares how the design is conceived or developed...lots of shit out there done with more typical/traditional process...

jump, other apps also allow for layers that allow for easy switching from option to option that don't have the issues that center mentions.

going along with other reasons why not to use photoshop...

Color changing is really annoying. you can't just select an object and change the color. Rather you have to apply filters or variations or hue or replace color and it's sorta unwieldy.

Aliasing gets messy as well cause you have those fringe pixels that need to be dealt with and you end up with bad edges.

You could deal with most things by layers but you'd eventually get so many layers that it's cumbersome. If you wanted to change all the red boxes to green, you have to do it individually. In Illustrator you could just change the color in the palette.

Just to go back. I used to be a hardcore photoshop user. I used it for everything and I was also under the impression that if it looks sexy it's all good. But that was in school. You do your presentation and then it's done. If you have to revist things to make changes at a later point it's orders of magnitude easier to use vector based graphics for architectural presentations. I started using Illustrator more for my job and now it's just as important to me as Photoshop. You need both ultimately to be the most comprehensive.

those things are actually pretty easy to do in ps. You can change the color pretty easily by using a shape layer, or making a new layer, ctrl clicking or cmd clicking the layer you want to change the color (it makes a selection of the objects on that layer) and filling with a new color.

You can also do layer comps in ps which is a nice feature to show iterations. I don't want to get into a illustrator/ps argument, but all of the problems (save scalability) are pretty easily remedied in ps.

FAT used photoshop to create the Brunel Rooms through sampling other images, assemblage etc. Judge the results.

One thing that I've found Photoshop to be good for, in an urban design process, are elevations of differentiated street facades. You can source photos of precedent typologies, deform them accordingly into 2d elevations and organize them as you well as layers, behind, say pavement, street furniture, etc. It works pretty well.

i used photoshop to design and render an interoffice competition to redesign our interior space. it's a tool. a pencil is a tool, chipboard, trace, they are all process tools. i like photoshop for quick projects because you can easily visulaize your idea three dimensionally as a collage. as far as applying filters: don't mess with any predesigned filters in photoshop. i tweak light properties, skew, and rotate i crop images of matericals/finishes and apply them as masks. photoshop is fantastic because you can easily incorporate realistic objects to ground the design while keeping forms abstract.

use it as an idea generator. i find most inspiration in my learning process and mistakes.

urbanist, photoshop is great for many things... from quick montages to sophisticated boards, and to conceptual pixel cities

Have a look at Adobe Illustrator... great tool, and quite complementary to Photoshop... I use it on everyday basis, and sincerely enjoy it

Yeah, I tend to use illustrator more and limit photoshop to the editing of individual images for assembly in AI. The UD thing was the only full production piece I've done in photoshop alone (other than dumping in peope and trees into max images).

I don't understand why using photoshop is even an issue for some architects. Architects have been using photoshop-like tools for generations to design. See Mies's Chicago Convention Hall image from the '40's (below) or his student Daniel Brenner's influential Theater and Arts Complex collaged into Albert Kahn's aircraft factory in 1946 (sorry can't find an image online of that one).