Good job Gerbil and Hescominsoon in making informed posts...
Macromedia was bought out by Adobe about 2 years ago. So Fireworks was folded into Adobe's product line with Photoshop.
I know. In fact I own a copy of Macromedia (before buy out) Fireworks and Dreamweaver but I've never used them as I want to do flash and they don't do flash. I also own a copy of Adobe Illustrator 10 but then Photoshop 7 does everything I need already.
There are plenty of ways to do Flash for free. Adobe provides a free Flash compiler in the Flex SDK. FlashDevelop/HaXe will allow you to write and compile action script into SWFs and there are free tweening libraries available to do basic animations with.
Really? I'll look into this TY. I may have overlooked it when I went on the hunt a while back as I want to be able to do games and may have figured it would be too hard that way.
Adobe is cheap software for the features it offers. Of course for some people, cheap is free. Take Flash for example. It is a vector editor, does animation, internet video, RIA and mobile development platform in one piece of software. $700 is a bargain.
There are plenty of ways to do Flash for free. Adobe provides a free Flash compiler in the Flex SDK. FlashDevelop/HaXe will allow you to write and compile action script into SWFs and there are free tweening libraries available to do basic animations with. Again, you will do a lot more work getting the free solutions to do things you could easily do in the Flash IDE and that is where the price point has to be seriously looked at. My designers make about $35 dollars and hour. If buying Flash over having them use free tools saves them 20 hours of additional work on projects in a year, then it has paid for itself which it does and some.
I said "the only must have software product for internet creation I want is Flash" so I am not saying "Flash isn't worth it", in fact I singled it out as needed (and if Adobe has anything to say it will remain so, remember Adobe was pushing SVG before it bought out it's competitor). It is however expensive to me as I have 0 money to spend on such things. If I got paid 35 dollars an hour it would be cheap to me too... need to outsource some work? huh, huh???
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I do think there are Adobe products that overlap too much in function with other products to warrant a whole product and upgraded versions also come out far to often offering too little differences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop_release_history only 2 years between each upgrade with each adding seemingly little reason to create a new product (with one year between some). Honestly how can anyone come up with must have new features on a regular basis anyway?
Anyway back to topic. As far as image editing when I bought Photoshop 7 I did not know about gimp (years ago 2002~) so I've never personally compared them, only read many glowing reports about Gimp. Basically for the digital painter (which is what I want to do) there are 2 options Photoshop and Corel Painter (drools but doesn't regret choice). I went with Photoshop because it's allows me to do more overall. I can output web pages, create game textures, create camera ready artwork, open most formats my father's printing company requires and edit them all. As far as my knowledge of fireworks goes I know very little. The wiki lists it as a vector and bitmap editor and Adobe says
Accelerate web design and development with Adobe® Fireworks® CS3 software, the ideal tool for creating and optimizing images for the web and rapidly prototyping websites.
If you want to do image editing that's not what you need. If you don't know vector artwork is defined by a series of vertexes like a 2D game polygon is (except you can have curves) it is un-suited to editing photos or images but great for creating masks/selections, small file sizes (thus web) or cell shaded type art. As far as editing bitmaps I do all my work in .psd files or on layers in rbg mode, I always convert from bitmap files. If you haven't already
Adobe has a trial version available of all its programs so I would definitely try it before buying. Try putting a political figure's head on a inappropriate body that's always a good test
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If you want to save a few bucks it's possible to hunt down a legitimate reseller on Ebay of an older copy of Photoshop and then buy the upgrade (which is how I got my copy years ago). However there are a lot of scammers (and even more incompetent people) out there and you absolutely must have the registration transferred to your name or you will not be able to upgrade. You also have to make sure it's not a academic version or a mac version etc. You also have to check which versions are eligible for upgrades (I believe the lowest version you can get is 7 to still be able to upgrade to CS3). Bottom line if you go this route you need to do the research, call Adobe, search Ebay for a long while and double check everything,
don't go off of me.
- When editing the cursor tends to lag horribly (like playing a game at 1 FPS, eh). While in PS it I have yet to see it do so.
Note: If you want to see lag in Photoshop (7 that is) create a standard size document say (300 ppi (resoulution) image 8.5 by 11 inches) paint a few colors on the canvas then try to use the smudge tool with a large brush setting
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