Welcome to my Adobe Fireworks CS4 site…

I love Adobe’s newest version of Fireworks CS4, you can do so much so quickly with it. It might not be quite as powerful as some of the other graphics editors in the Adobe line but I find it much more productive for certain tasks. The mixture of vector and bitmap editing with non-modal editors makes creating web graphics a breeze. You can accomplish the same results but with less keystrokes and mouse clicks as compared to for instance the ever popular graphics giant Photoshop. Although Photoshop can do a few things Fireworks CS4 can’t, for the bulk of what I do Fireworks CS4 is a lot faster.

As mentioned earlier Fireworks CS4 utilizes ‘non-modal’ parameter editing which unlike Photoshop means you can change the values of these parameters without having to hit ‘ok’ to close a window each time. This makes for a more fluid editing process. Overall Photoshop feels a little cumbersome as you have to do things like Control-T to transform while in Fireworks CS4 you just grab handles and move.

So for any typical creation of vector graphics which are the staple of many web design projects, Fireworks CS4 allows much faster editing of these values. You can also type in directly very simply to create vectors of exact sizes. Moving elements on the canvas is also more productive due to the intelligent snapping available. Photoshop provides a lot of power in the way it handles layers and masks but for many operations this is overkill. Fireworks CS4’s more straightforward approach handles these tasks more elegantly.

Another big advantage of Fireworks CS4 is it’s rendering of compressed images for later uploading to sites. The compression algorithms seem very efficient resulting in small file sizes but with a higher quality looking image compared to some of the other packages available.

Speaking of which the export features for creating websites is well done. Fireworks CS4 css export option is available which was previously handled by a 3rd party plugin. With use of the master pages feature you can create a template, the resulting custom pages, and then export this all as a css and html file for uploading to your server.