Products used/reviewed:
The following products were either used to create elements of or the website itself.

For the Cliparts:

Macromedia Fireworks 3 was used in adding lettering, creating animations, and revising cliparts. We recently begun making our images transparent with this product. We recieved a package deal in buying fireworks as part of a suite along with Dream Weaver 3

The procedure for all of our cliparts was: they were hand drawn, scanned in using an HP 5200C scanner, modified by Photodeluxe (color modifications, corrections, resizing), and saved in jpg format before moving into the next stage of creation. This stage was to convert them to gif format, reduce the amount of color in them, and make them transparent. We also made the thumbnails at this point also.

Fireworks seems to be a very good product, though it takes some getting used to. We find that we still do the initial editing and work with photodeluxe because fireworks perhaps has too many tools, which really make it more difficult to use. You cannot pick up fireworks and make things right away with it. Learning many of the things we did took some close reading. We were able to make an animated button quickly though with help files soon after we opened the box. Fireworks is much easier to use than Photoshop in that aspect.

The complexity however does create some much more efficient images. Photodeluxe does not make gifs as efficiently, and gif construction set animations are bulky in size compared to fireworks animations.

It is worth the time it takes to learn fireworks. I am sure that we have not even begun to unlock the potential of this program.

 

Grade 5 out of 5.

Next Review: PhotoShop