Fireworks is an image editing program that can be purchased by itself or as part of the Dreamweaver 4/Fireworks 4 Studio. It works integrally with Flash, Dreamweaver, and Freehand.

Its interface is standard to most image editing programs and the whole interface integrates with the other Macromedia web authoring products.

While Fireworks is an image editing program, it also has an array of vector editing tools. Thus, both types of images can be created or edited in Fireworks. I also found myself creating artwork for buttons or other elements in Fireworks because it was so easy to switch between vector or raster (bitmapped) images.

Fireworks has good import and export capabilities. It can import and export Photoshop files keeping the layering and layer masks intact. It can also import EPS files, Freehand files, and the traditional formats such as TIFF and BMP. It can also export as Illustrator files, SWF (flash) files, and the traditional formats such as TIFF and BMP.

An important new feature which involves other Macromedia products is Roundtrip editing. This means that a file can be edited directly from Dreamweaver, for example, using Fireworks. One can, also, launch and edit directly from Flash so one does not have to be continually opening and closing programs. From Dreamweaver, one can also edit and update HTML and JavaScript code and graphics.

The Launch and Edit window enables the user to do editing work in Flash on documents created in Fireworks or other programs and only have to click "done" to resume working in the host application. I did not realize what a great feature this was until I started bringing articles into the Perpetualvisions web site. Since I had not always created borders around the illustrations, I needed to do it. It not only simplified the task, but I didn't have to resave and/or resample JPEGs or GIFs.

Fireworks can, also, increase productivity through its batch processing capabilities.

Having used Adobe Photoshop since version 2.5, I always tend to compare any image editing program with it. While all my static fine art work is created in Photoshop, I found that I really enjoyed using Fireworks 4 for optimizing and modifying my images to either place them in Flash 5 or directly into an HTML page in Dreamweaver. I found that I could not beat Fireworks for optimizing files. The PNG files that I exported from Fireworks were usually smaller and better than either their JPEG or GIF equivalent. However, exported PNG files did not work in Dreamweaver's Preview Browsers even though the IE version that I used was 5.5 and Netscape Communicator was 4.75. The exported PNG images looked fine when placed on a page in either Browser but when I tried to link to a page that contained an exported PNG file, the graphic was not visible even though the page opened. The only way I could correct this was to use GIF or JPEG exports. As a note, even though it is not relevant since I could not use PNG files anyway, but when large complex files needed to be prepared for the web, the lossless compression of the PNG file format created too large a file although the quality was very good. The illustration below shows some of the choices available for optimizing files in Fireworks.

While Fireworks 4 supports excellent PSD import options, it only supports one Alpha channel according to the manual. However, I could not successfully open an image or place an image in Fireworks that contained any Alpha channels. The only image visible was the image on the Photoshop Alpha channel. To correct this situation, I had to delete all the Alpha channels before opening or importing the image into Fireworks.

In writing a review, it is sometimes hard to keep it from being choppy or disjointed because in a good product there are so many areas to cover. One area that I found interesting was the Layers Panel. Under the web layer is found anything that pertains to manipulating images on the web such as hot spots, slicing,etc.

All the tools of a good image editing program are available in Fireworks. As a regular image editing package, I found it was extremely good and easy to use. Its scope goes way beyond only preparing images for the web.

For more information, see the Macromedia web site. The price for the Dreamweaver 4/ Fireworks 4 Studio is about $420 while the upgrade is about $190. The retail price of Fireworks 4 is about $290, and the upgrade is about $140.