Mastering shadows in Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks, who’s the winner?

Shading has been a vital part of art and design since ever, because it’s the way for people to actually be capable of emulating light and 3D environments within a 2D workspace, whether if it is on traditional techniques (painting, airbrushing, etc.) or digital work. Many times the designers stick to a single way of doing things and so they tend to forget or even to leave unexplored further methods that might be even more effective that the ones they defend, this statement made us think about the many different ways you can create shadows in graphic / web design.

We have taken the 3 most popular graphic programs utilized by graphic designers to do all their digital work, specially web interfaces: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Fireworks. We have executed a series of tests to find out the different types of shadows that you can make in these programs and then we compared and figured out which technique works better on each program, so now we like to offer you the results of our research.

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