Archive for March 2009
Fireworks or Photoshop
Have you every wondered why Adobe kept Fireworks in CS after buying Macromedia? After all Adobe had a very similar product in Photoshop. A few of our Designers attended one of the Adobe training days at Darling Harbour last week and learnt amongst other things a key difference between Fireworks and Photoshop – image compression.
Every designer know how to save for web in their sleep. Resizing and downsampling the image to 72dpi and setting the compression rate to 60% or 80% for best results is a part of every web designers repertoire but getting the right mix of file size and quality has always been a challenge.
What we were interested to discover was that Fireworks does a far superior job at compressing the image and maintaining quality than photoshop.
Here is a sample of the same jpg image compressed with Fireworks and Photoshop at 80% quality.
The Fireworks image on the left came out at 55kb whilst the Photoshop image is at 96kb. That’s a huge difference….
and here’s another couple of images. The Photoshop image (left) has been reduced to match the Fireworks image (right) file size 16KB.
If we can shave almost 50% filesize off every image whilst maintaining quality then in my opinion Fireworks pays for itself on day one.
