What does Fireworks give me that Photoshop doesn't?

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1

They say that Adobe Fireworks is “optimized for the web”…but I can make graphics much more easily or just as easily in Photoshop as in Fireworks…can someone who works w/ Fireworks tell me what (if anything) I’m missing?

Thanks.
~TehYoyo

2

EASY WAY to make animated GIFs inan OPTIMIZED and LOGICAL fashion.
More control over PNG transparency and optimization.
Am not certain if the SAVE FOR WEB algorithm is differing in FW and PS but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is.
It also feels to me as if the drawing tools handle in a more specialized way.

3

I’m really asking this because I’m on a budget…do I drop the (is it $400?) cash for Fireworks for small advantages? Are the advantages small?

~TehYoyo

4

Honestly. It’s the pilot not the plane. I hardly ever use it, BUT it saves me TONS of times when I do. DO NOTE: There are dozens of shareware apps ($10-25) out there that do 1 or 2 things that FW does so that’s an alternative. The most important thing to take into account is: if you are learning and growing, start at with basics., such as PS-- THEN expand as needed.

5

Yeah. I think that that’s what I’ll do. Thanks a lot.

~TehYoyo

6

Photoshop has caught up to Fireworks in terms of animation and GIFs. I don’t see anything on the market that can do graphics like Photoshop especially with the new beta CS6 release.

7

I didn’t think that the beta release was super groundbreaking…most releases are just a few upgrades and some features from other programs brought into the others. I tried to make a gif and it kept turning out bad (in PS). But maybe I was doing it wrong…

~TehYoyo

8

Fireworks is good if you don’t already have a vector program as it does vector, something Photoshop can’t do. Another strong point for Fireworks is in how it allows you to save images for the web, .png format in particular, something Photoshop is completely incapable of doing well at all.

With PS only, you’ll additionally need a good image compression tool.

9

How much compression is the difference? If I make a .png image in PS that’s, say, 30kb, how much of a difference is it? What about a 200kb image (not that I would normally make an image that large)?

I’m learning Illustrator at the moment.

~TehYoyo

10

Depends on the type of image and how many colors and effects you have. The good thing with FW is that you can actually delete color by color to make the file smaller. Even without going that far, I’ve been able to reduce file sizes up to 90%.

See this article for some info.

11

Wow. Those are some significant file size changes. But even so, does it offer more than just a great image compression technique? Or is it worth the cost?

~TehYoyo

12

This largely depends on what you’re planning to do. If you plan on doing a lot of vector work, then I’d say it’s a tool you should consider. There is, of course, Illustrator which is slightly more advanced for vector work, but it doesn’t have the good file compression options.

And then there are other, cheaper alternatives, so I’d say, download the trial version of the various tools and see which one you find to be the most intuitive.

If you just need to do the occasional raster graphics and already have Photoshop, then you don’t need it.

I’d not buy Fireworks just for its good PNG compression abilities. For that there might be tools that probably do the job just as well, e.g. like the tools in the article I posted or using PHP’s GD Library.

13

Alright, sure. I might have enough cash to get FW b/c I found out I can use a student license for commercial work, so I might upgrade my MC.

Thanks.
~TehYoyo

Edit: I’m at school atm, so I tried out FW w/ their edition of CS5. I did the same experiment as the article linked to. My results:

I tried making the highest file I could - I started w/ a standard 600 x 600 px canvas, applied rainbow gradients w/ different transparency stops in the image. Saved from Photoshop. Next, I followed the steps described and saved it from Fireworks. [url=http://i.imgur.com/mU5PV.png]Saved from Fireworks. The result? The second image (33kb) was 7% of the first image (458kb)! Although this is astounding, you can clearly see the lack of quality in the second one. So I tried it w/ a photo, a more realistic idea of what I would be using on a website. [URL=“http://i.imgur.com/2UzE6.png”]The first image was 87kb, the second [url=http://i.imgur.com/ekVPx.png]30.8KB.

Thoughts?