Macromedia Fireworks

Using Photoshop Plug-ins
You can use Photoshop plug-ins in Fireworks. One File > Preferences > Folders and click on Browse nest to Photoshop Plug-Ins to specify their location. you can use these plug-ins from the Effects palette.

Thumbnails
Create a thumbnail of your image using the Export Preview. Click on File > Export Preview > File. You can either choose the size of the file as a percentage of the current file, or enter a specify height and width for exported file.

Optimizing JPEGs
The Optimize palette provides various options for optimizing JPEG images. These can be accessed under the menu on the Optimize palette. First change the Export file format to JPEG. Optimize to Size changes an image's attributes to constraint it to a certain file size. Progressive JPEG creates an image that displays at a low resolution while the rest of it is downloading. Sharpen Edges preserves sharp edges, like the edges of text.

Super Fast
You can speed up Fireworks by location the scratch disk on the fastest drive available. The scratch disk is a temporary space to the hard disk where temporary information, such as the Undo information is stored. As you edit the image, this is continuously written to and read from. To change the location of the scratch disk, open File > Preferences > Folder and change the Primary Scratch Disk to the fastest drive on the System

Batch Processing
Fireworks can perform several actions upon an entire batch of files, thus saving a lot of time, Click on File > Batch Process to open the Batch Process dialog box, Select the scope of the files it should work upon from the Files to Process drop down. you can find and replace items like text, fonts, colors, etc. On these files. You can also export them all to a different format, scaling them to a different size if desired. Fireworks provides and option to backup the flies, too. Apart from these preset options, you can also run a Fireworks script upon multiple files.

Fading text
Creating animated GIF's with fading text is a piece of cake with Fireworks. Using the Text tool, type the text that appears initially and set its color and any other attributes. With the text object selected, click on Insert > convert to Symbol. The symbol is saved on the Library palette and the object on the canvas has a small shortcut arrow on the lower left corner, Close the object (Edit ? Clone) and set its opacity to 0% from the Object palette. click on Modify > Arrange > Sent to Back to send the transparent instance behind the opaque one. Click on Modify ? Symbol > Tween Instances. Set the number of steps from the animation and check Distributed to Frames. These frames appear on the Frames palette. Export the files as an Animated GIF with the desired settings.

Font Styles
Fireworks allows emboldening and italicising text even if these are unavailable to the system When a stoke to Transform tool is applied to the text, the applies style may be lost, since the operation is perforated on the outlines online. Hence, it is better to use fonts for which the desired style is available

Roller Coaster Text
Fireworks lets you form text along any line. Draw the like with a Pencil, Pen or Brush tool. The text that you apple to this path will also take the direction it is drawn in, apart from its shape. Type the text with the Text tool and format as desired. Using the Pointer tool, select both, the text block and the path. Click on Text > Attach to Path.

Cleaner Text
Small text does not always look neat on GIF images, You can achieve a certain amount of sharpness, though. Type the text using the Text and set the font size and other attributes. Check the Fill palette to ensure that Anti-aliasing is on. Clone the text object and set the Edge to Hard on Fill palette. The combination of both these objects should result in better rendering for small sized text. The Opacity of the objects can be manipulated to achieve a good balance of the two.