Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks: What is right for me?

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Some people may be stuck on deciding whether to use Photoshop or Fireworks for there deisgn project. The answer is very simple.

First thing you need to ask yourself is, what am I designing? If you are making a website, I would suggest Fireworks. If its graphical art your working on, your best bet is to use Photoshop. And if your working on both, use both.

Fireworks

When designing web sites, flyers, banners or anything that is going to involve alot of textual content, your best bet is to use Fireworks. There are tons of different tools and options that will help you optimize your project.

Fireworks has an auto-lock type feature, that when you are playing with text boxes and other objects and trying to get them the same size, it will auto-adjust to the same size as the one next to it when you are close enough. This channels out an annoying problem most designers face on a regular basis, no more zooming!

Gives you the ability to make and edit html slices before exporting to Dreamweaver. This cuts out the task of re-doing the html file everytime you want to edit it.

Fireworks was engineered and geared more towards web design.

Photoshop

If designing something with alot of detail on a more graphical scale, Photoshop is your maker. All the tools Adobe Photoshop has to offer enable rich minutian designs. You can even use it to design web layouts using its famous slice tool.

Photoshop is probably more widely known and used then Fireworks, even if they are making web pages. Alot of people edit pictures, not everyone creates web pages, making everyone comfortable with the program. Photoshop is perhaps the most powerful image editing software out, thus making it most popular.

Use Both

If your project is someone with both text and images, you should definately use both. Using both of these powerful tools together can produce amaizing things. I use both everyday, and it gives me the best of both worlds advantage.

Just save your psd files (photoshop files) as a jpeg or giff images, make sure the quality is set to high if there is alot of detail. Now you have editable, graphical images that you can open and use in Fireworks. This enables you to use Photoshops extense image editing tools and Fireworks contentual tools at the same time. Check out my Intergrating Photoshop with Fireworks tutorial to see how.