Re: Anybody use ImageReady? Pros/Cons?

At 7:43 AM 10/15/98, David T. Schaller wrote:
> In Fireworks, you have to save in Fireworks own format or export
> to other, flattened, formats, so you can't modify an image in
> Photoshop very well.

That's true, Fireworks 1.0 does not write out layered PSD formats. The
rationale here is that Photoshop is great at processing photos, but is not
that strong at compression, animation, image slicing, and so on. That's why
we focused more on Photoshop import than export -- if anything, you'd come
from Photoshop to Fireworks, rather than the other way around.

Photoshop *is* able to open Fireworks native file formats. That's because
Fireworks uses PNG, an open standard described by the World Wide Web
Consortium. Unfortunately Photoshop has no way to reproduce the live
strokes, the multi-object layering, the animation/compression info, and
other features available in Fireworks. Photoshop can get just the imagery
from the Fireworks PNG, but cannot do anything with the Fireworks editing
data.

Fireworks also reads in layered Photoshop files, too. This is particularly
helpful if you have multilayer PSDs that you wish to animate... Fireworks
can actually *add* such PSDs to an existing animation, rather than only
using them to create new frames as ImageReady does.

Just like ImageReady, though, Fireworks cannot edit all new Photoshop
features such as its new multifont text, its Live Effects settings, and so
on. (Fireworks can edit its own multifont text and Live Effects, of course,
but not from a PSD import yet.) Fireworks and ImageReady can get
some-but-not-all editing information from a native Photoshop file.


Give a try to the animation in Fireworks, too... rotation and scaling are
usually very important on the web, and the animated embossing and so on are
really pretty neat. It's particularly fun to animate text-along-a-curve. I
think you'll enjoy it.

btw, if you find that there are particular tasks that you wish Fireworks
would ease more than it already does, then folks on the development team
are quite eager to hear the info, please... mail to
"wish-fireworks(at)macromedia.com" will go directly to the entire planning
group, and will also be archived for feature prioritization too. Thanks!

jd



John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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