If you work on a Windows OS, you would have encountered Microsoft Paint. If not, I would advise you to get started on it rightaway -- not because it is the greatest, most intuitive software for graphics. It isn't by any stretch of imagination. What Microsoft Paint does is give you the idea about the bare minimum that a software for creating graphics should possess. For a moment, think of yourself as a painter. What are the tools that you would require at the minimum?
- A Canvas
- Colors
- Paint brush
Now, look at the MS Paint window. You see the white space that represents the canvas, and the various tools on the left that you can use to paint on that canvas.
Of course, what you can do in MS paint is more than just paint your basic fantasies. You can also add text, open images, crop images, and so on. Although MS Paint looks like a primitive software, I know people who have worked wonders with it. Just goes to show that if you give the right people the basic tools, they pretty much would get things done without too much complaining.
Fireworks is an advanced, much more advanced tool. You can do many things with Fireworks, and I am listing a few below.
- Place both vector and bitmap images on the same canvas, and modify them: For information on the difference between bitmap and vector images, see http://www.eastbywest.com/pub/vectorbitmap/. To keep things very simple, a photograph from your camera imported into your computer is a bitmap image. A flower that you draw in Fireworks using the drawing tools is a vector image. A bitmap image is made up of a number of pixels. When a bitmap image is enlarged, the software adds a number of additional pixels to the image, and the quality of the image deteriorates. Vector images are created using complex calculations involving geometry. They can be resized without any loss of clarity.
- Modify photographs : You can modify photographs much in the same way as you do in Photoshop. You can apply filters and various other effects to selected portions of a photgraph. In addition, you can import photographs from you camera directly into Fireworks for editing.
- Create and save screenshots: You can create screenshots pretty much in the same way as you do in Photoshop. When you press Print Screen, the dimensions of the window being captured are used to calculate the size of the new document in Fireworks.
- Create flowcharts (basic ones): Fireworks provides the basic symbols that are required to create flowcharts.
- Create prototypes: This should have been point number one, but I deliberately shifted it to the second position because if you are a beginner, you wouldn't be starting off with prototyping rightaway. Before you begin creating your website in Dreamweaver, Fireworks helps you to create various prototypes that you can show to your client before you start working with tables and styles in Dreamweaver. The prototype can include interactive elements like drop down menus, slide animations etc.
The native format in which files are saved in Fireworks is the PNG format. When you save a file in Fireworks as a Fireworks PNG file, the layers and other aspects of the file are retained, and remain editable. The image is flattened only when you save it in the normal PNG format.
Now that you know what you can do in Fireworks, we will take up each of these cases one by one, and explore Fireworks. It is going to be fun!
