What I’ve read online says that Vector art uses math to make the image scale better but isn’t ‘math’ used in Pixel art in, say, Photoshop as well? I’m having trouble wrapping my head around how the math might be different when creating a line in Photoshop vs Illustrator for example.
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Vector graphics are essentially a program that says, “Draw this shape here, at this size, in this color.” Raster graphics are a picture of that shape, at that spot and size, in that color. If you scale vector graphics, the shape gets redrawn from scratch, like painting a new one on a canvas. If you scale raster graphics, stuff gets pulled, stretched, blurred, and enhanced to arrive at a “best guess” of what the shape would have looked like if it was created with those dimensions in the first place, like stretching a drawing on the surface of a balloon. Things get messed up.
So vector is a better choice on graphics that need precise scaling to any size, but raster is generally superior for paint-like artistic imagery and definitely for photo editing.
Photoshop sort of combines the two through the use of layers, masks, and shapes, but that’s a pretty complicated topic.
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