What is the best product for interior designers?

[Guest]

Have not purchased a Photoshop product yet. Which one is best for interior designers? Tx

[John Waller · Accepted solution]

There's no single answer. Depends on what you want to do with the software and what you want the software to do.

Your choice: Photoshop Elements or Photoshop or Creative Cloud or Photoshop/Lightroom bundle.

Do you prefer to own the software (perpetual license) or subscribe and pay a monthly fee (Creative Cloud)?

[the_wine_snob]

In addition to John's suggestions, I would also look into Adobe Illustrator.

Because it's a Vector Art program, when you have, say your furniture in Plan View, you can Scale them up, or down, while retaining sharpness. You can also design (or possibly buy), common furniture art, to be reused in many AI documents.

In several CC (Creative Cloud) suites, AI is included, but check it out first.

Good luck,

Hunt

[Trevor.Dennis]

Or maybe look at one of those 3D packages.  It's a competitive world, and impressing the client with a virtual walk-through of the revamped environment might be the difference between you, and someone else getting the work. 

Home Styler comes from the same people who make Autocad, which is as good a recommendation as you can get.  I know nothing about it, but it says it's free!

http://usa.autodesk.com/homestyler/

But from an Adobe products point of view.  Photoshop for sure IMHO.  You can use it in a similar way to an airbrush artists adding shading and textures, and light and shadow. 

Something else I'd definitely think about, is an Interior Design forum.  Flickr has thousands of such groups (it calls them Pools now), and you can ask the people already doing the same thing

http://www.flickr.com/groups/interior/

[cypmcd]

I am studying interior design and I find the best products to use are photoshop/illustrator (for custom furniture design), indesign (For client mood boards etc) and archicad 19 for rendering perspective digital drawings!

hope this helps

[imfreeze95]

Thank you 

[roy88528456]

Hi,

I think before getting into Photoshop you need first an interior design software to render your draft designs. You can use 3D Studio Max, Blender or Sketchup. Or use a web-based interior design software like: InnoPlanner, Homestyler or Planner5d.

Afterwards you can proceed to Photoshop to refine your rendering image into a final photorealistic representation.

[imfreeze95]

Thank you I appreciate it