Anthony Milner

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.

Ok this has turned my world of images on its head. It’s like someone just discovered that the world is round or that humans can fly, ok that’s an exaggeration but it still knocked my socks off. In the world of web development images are fixed. Page layout can be dynamically resized, but images once cropped and optimised remain fixed. Well actually not anymore, as Ohgizmo reported a couple of days ago…

Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel has developed some software to automatically [resize images], in realtime no less. Watch and be amazed :