This is the seventh of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) Master Collection. When Adobe released CS5 this year, they not only will release single version products, but also five separate suites of products. They are Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.
Adobe Fireworks CS5 is a bitmap and vector graphics editor that was originally developed and distributed by Macromedia. It is the industry leader for prototyping and rapid web building. It has heavy duty exporting and image optimization abilities and is the software of choice for web designers that build large websites.
Sometimes there is confusion between Adobe Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop. Fireworks is not a replacement for Photoshop, but rather it is a tool that is better suited for working with site layouts and mock designs. It is also more efficient in creating web graphics as it has everything you need in one application.
Being positioned as the tool to prototype website and web applications, now you can use it to do the graphic design and layout that goes into creating a website before it gets into Dreamweaver. Since Dreamweaver and Fireworks have really been together from the start, this move was a natural.
So what is new with Fireworks CS5?
• Feature and workflow enhancements - include productivity improvements for letting you create rich, multi-layered web images, comps, and interactive designs with fewer steps, while maintaining the quality, accuracy, and flexibility of your designs. In addition, significant changes have been made in the user interface that enables you to access key features directly from the Properties panel. These include faster and more accurate vector resizing, precise gradient editing, easier adjustment of vector stroke alignment, custom stroke editing and creation, and page preview and insertion.
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