Rating: 
Summary: Great Alternative for Photoshop
Review: Although it is a heavy application and not as professional as Adobe Photoshop - Macromedia Fireworks enables anyone with very little experience to create good looking Graphics and special effects to any image with very little design experience. The price is great comparing to Photoshop Suite which is close to $1000. To tell you the truth I used Fireworks on most of my sites and Photoshop just for the last touch and some very special effects that I didn't know how to do on Fireworks. It is very easy to create shapes since you can move each lines individually - you can control every single dot in the image, and you don't have to be an expert - everything is explained - and this software is followed by some great tutorials by Macromedia.
Rating:
Summary: Manuals and reputations can be misleading...
Review: As a lifelong artist, but relatively new web designer, I have owned Photoshop 6, Illustrator 9, and FrontPage 2000 for as long as their respective lives. Despite the help of numerous 3rd party books, AND the sizable manuals of the Adobe products, I still could not get past using only FrontPage for virtually all web work (I admit, FrontPage is pretty straight-forward and easy). I did feel like a kid on training wheels, and knew my creativity was suffering horribly due to my lack of creative control. I considered trying Macromedia products. I was always a little intimidated by Dreamweaver's rep as a 'professional' web authoring tool, and figured if I couldn't learn the Adobe products, why try to learn DW? Eventually curiosity prevailed and I decided to give the DW and Fireworks 4 demos a try. I fell in love with both. IMO, Fireworks is very intuitive . I quickly learned how to utilize most of the features by simply referring to the 'poor' Fireworks help menu, and trial & error. I produced some outstanding effects, buttons, menus, animations, and banners with Fireworks. (no more tiled GIF newbie backgrounds!) I feel like a pro! I also read a few books on HTML to break away from relying on the "cookie-cutter" designing style of FrontPage. I work in DW code view more than design view now. I use Fireworks design objects almost exclusively. With the seamless intigration, and a little code tweaking (personal preference), I am achieving outstanding results. And to think I was a NEWBIE less than a year ago. I couldn't purchase Fw, DW, and Flash fast enough.There are several great books on how to use Fireworks. Virtually all of them can be found right here, in Amazon. While PS6 is the better image editor, Fireworks holds it's ground in virtually all other areas. It is a very powerful program (when used properly). I tried Fireworks 4 and ultimately bought it (along with Dreamweaver 4 & Flash 5) I suggest you give the demo a spin.
Rating:
Summary: Not a Photoshop or Paintshop Pro wanna be!
Review: Fireworks 4 is not a Photoshop wanna be. It's sole purpose is the design,layout and implementation of fantastic websites. Fireworks is better suited than photoshop for web graphics. Why, you ask? because it uses vector graphics to maitain editablity for all time. This means if a client does not like a color or font style, you can use Firework's find and replace to update your enitre set of files! Fireworks also allows you to save buttons you create in a library that can be used over and over.
You want to use Photoshop along side Fireworks to do any bitmap editing. Firworks does have a nice set of bitmap tools, but let Photoshop handle your serious photographic work. In closing, remember: Photoshop is a BITMAP editor. It does not allow you the same FLEXABILITY as Fireworks will. Fireworks 4 is BOTH a bitmap & vector program. So when it comes to creating the best looking websites in the least amount of time, look no further!
Rating:
Summary: Not a Photoshop or Paintshop Pro wanna be!
Review: Fireworks 4 is not a Photoshop wanna be. It's sole purpose is the design,layout and implementation of fantastic websites. Fireworks is better suited than photoshop for web graphics. Why, you ask? because it uses vector graphics to maitain editablity for all time. This means if a client does not like a color or font style, you can use Firework's find and replace to update your enitre set of files! Fireworks also allows you to save buttons you create in a library that can be used over and over.
You want to use Photoshop along side Fireworks to do any bitmap editing. Firworks does have a nice set of bitmap tools, but let Photoshop handle your serious photographic work. In closing, remember: Photoshop is a BITMAP editor. It does not allow you the same FLEXABILITY as Fireworks will. Fireworks 4 is BOTH a bitmap & vector program. So when it comes to creating the best looking websites in the least amount of time, look no further!
Rating:
Summary: SoftwareBomber - 269.00
Review: Great Product - 269 at SoftwareBomber
Rating:
Summary: Fireworks works for me
Review: I am surprised at the negative reviews. I have been using Dreamweaver and Fireworks for a couple of years and find Fireworks very useful in creating web graphics. Fireworks 4 is a substantial improvement over 3. I teach DW and FW basics to colleagues where I work and find the tutorials very useful in preparing lessons. Since I was familiar with Photoshop before I started using Fireworks, perhaps I din't notice the problems mentioned, and yes, I did use the Quickstart book and also found the tutorial in Fireworks very smooth. It's not an easy program but it's worth learning.
Rating:
Summary: Fireworks works for me
Review: I am surprised at the negative reviews. I have been using Dreamweaver and Fireworks for a couple of years and find Fireworks very useful in creating web graphics. Fireworks 4 is a substantial improvement over 3. I teach DW and FW basics to colleagues where I work and find the tutorials very useful in preparing lessons. Since I was familiar with Photoshop before I started using Fireworks, perhaps I din't notice the problems mentioned, and yes, I did use the Quickstart book and also found the tutorial in Fireworks very smooth. It's not an easy program but it's worth learning.
Rating: 
Summary: Fireworks-Dud or Stud?
Review: I first bought this product because of all the good reviews I read about it that it ranks right up there with Photoshop. This may be true if you can ever figure out how to use it. Unlike Photoshop, you won't find any good books or tutorials on how to use this product. Now if you can't use this program, what is it worth? Certainly not what their asking for it. I do see that Macromedia has work shops that you can travel to and some internet training for their products but at a high cost, and I don't know if they are any good, and I don't care to spend the money or drive the distance to find out. In my opion, if you can't provide a good tutorial and include it with your product and not as an added cost, then what good is your product to the average Joe. In my opion this Fireworks program is a dud, and these good reviews that I've read about Fireworks are not coming from the general public but from industry exectives.
Rating:
Summary: Web graphics? You need Fireworks!
Review: I have to say it... I love Macromedia Fireworks. I'd been using PhotoShop and ImageReady, but no more. Fireworks makes building not just web graphics easy, but entire nav bars and even full websites. If you're in need a graphics, this is the way to go. You can build simple rollovers and disjointed rollovers as easily as just basic graphics. Plus, editing them afterward is a snap, especially if you're working with Dreamweaver. The two programs have completely seamless integration. It can work with any font on your computer. And, it'll impress your clients like nothing you've used before. You can even import graphics from Illustrator, FreeHand and PhotoShop with very little trouble. A great program.
Rating:
Summary: Quick, Easy and Fun
Review: I recently purchased Fireworks to design our company webpage. I had been trying to use Frontpage, but that was not going well (I haven't been able to produce any quality pages with FrontPage, and I don't want to invest the time to learn how). Fireworks is very easy to learn, especially if you have used Photoshop and Illustrator (you can use the same shortcut keys from Photoshop). It works pretty much like Photoshop and Illustrator rolled up in one package (although it can't do everything those programs do). So far it's taken me a few days to go through the tutorial, lessons, and read the manual, and I've already got several cool web page designs up and ready to go. I was quite satisfied with the product and will use it for all my web work now (with help from Photoshop and Illustrator for some cooler photo and graphics effects). All in all, an excellent product. Oh, and I'm by no means an expert user of these programs, so don't be afraid if you haven't done too much web work in the past.
| 
