Fireworks vs Photoshop

After seeing a discussion over at Digital Web Magazine I started thinking about which program I prefer and why. Pretty much since the beginning I’ve been a Photoshop advocate. I was an Adobe girl through and through and it was years before I had even heard of Macromedia (my first introduction was through Dreamweaver). When I found out about Fireworks I thought I’d try it out and see what it was like. I tried out Fireworks MX and my first impression was not good. The user interface was so different from Photoshop and it was difficult for me to find things. The simplest task seemed to take forever. I gave FW a few more tries and then gave up thinking that I would shun the product for eternity. A year and a half ago I started working at a location that had Adobe CS2 on all of the computers. Of course I ran to Photoshop but my coworker was a Fireworks advocate and I decided to try it out again. My opinion didn’t change and at times I wanted to erase the program off of my computer. All of that changed when I went to Adobe’s website and watched some videos about Fireworks CS3 and saw that the interface was more like Adobe products. I did some reading and I began to understand why some web designers worked primarily in Fireworks. For website mock-ups there were features that Fireworks did much better than Photoshop. I could see where I could cut time in my designs by using some of the symbols in the common library. Add to that the fact that Fireworks can now handle Photoshop files and I’m sold. Photoshop will still be my primary go to when it comes to doing photo manipulation and graphic design work but Fireworks has now won a place in my heart for web design work.

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