I am a long-time Adobe Photoshop user; I remember using Photoshop 2.0 for Mac in the late-1980s to manipulate images for prepress design work. Even then, it was an amazingly powerful and inspiring application. Over the years it has only gotten better, with a feature list impossible to summarize and amazing extensibility and flexibility. Photoshop is one of those programs that makes the user feel that there is always more to learn, and that there are new creative things to be done.

Photoshop remains my prepress graphics tool of choice. My main beef with the current version (5.5) is the ImageReady component, which was at one point marketed as a separate product to handle Web graphic editing and optimization. ImageReady turns the already big Photoshop application into a behemoth; the resulting app is sluggish and quirky, and sometimes crashes my big office Pentium.

When it was time to upgrade Macromedia Dreamweaver from version 2 to version 3, we purchased the "studio" upgrade that included Macromedia Fireworks. I had seen a demo of Fireworks at a trade show, and was impressed enough to give it serious consideration, at least for specialized tasks such as creating complex Web page layouts and animations. That was five months ago. Photoshop and Fireworks are both installed on my computer, but I now use Fireworks for Web graphics about 80% of the time.

While Firework's feature set is similar to Photoshop/ImageReady, I feel the software is more focused on Web graphics, and the various features are easier to use. I also like the ability to manipulate images as individual objects, and the good support for vector graphics. Macromedia has obviously looked at competing Web graphics programs and adopted existing "best practice" in its software. The result is a tool with amazing range.

Fireworks facilitates a number of Web design processes that I had been using in Photoshop. For example, for more complex designs I would often do the entire layout in Photoshop, then slice the image up and dump the pieces into my HTML editor. To make this common practice easier, Fireworks has a slice tool and a Web layer; slices can be exported as individual graphics with accompanying HTML. Fireworks shines in a number of other areas as well: JavaScript rollovers, GIF animation, graphics optimization, object effects, and vector graphics.

Photoshop is clearly the standard by which other graphics programs have been and will be judged, but it isn't the perfect tool for everyone. It is certainly no tool for novices. It is expensive and requires a higher-end system in order to run properly. The feature set and some of the concepts will be overwhelming for those just getting into photo manipulation and graphics editing. If you are interested in Photoshop-like program that won't scare you to death, the obvious choice is the excellent Jasc Paint Shop Pro, available as shareware.