Why use the Image Editing panel in Fireworks? In short, because it is a real timesaver! Anything that saves time and reduces the frustration of searching through numerous menus is a welcome addition for any user.

With the spread of outsourced, data-driven websites with editable regions, almost everyone in an organization (and especially those in academia, as I am) must be able to edit content and upload images that are optimized for the web. If you have been assigned an editable region of a page on a website or intranet site that you are responsible for updating from time to time, you are really going to appreciate the timesaving features of the Image Editing panel.

Managing all your digital images

If you have a digital camera, you probably have a lot of digital images. You can simply download them from your camera into a folder (perhaps named Camera) on your computer desktop, open them in Fireworks, and go from there. In addition, scanning prints is still a very good way to gather digital images. If you have stacks of prints like most of us do, you could scan them to another desktop folder named something like Scanned Images.

If you have the camera or scanner software installed on your computer, you can import files directly into Fireworks by selecting File > Scan > Twain Select and selecting either the camera or scanner. (On a Mac, select either File > Acquire > Twain Select or File > Acquire > Camera Select.) Though resolution on a screen can be only 72 (or in some cases 96) DPI, it is a good idea to save all of your images at a higher resolution in order to be able to edit and enhance them later for the web and still retain a copy for quality printing later.

I prefer to save a copy of all of my original images as 300 DPI TIFF files in a folder on my computer desktop. After completing a project, I move all of the files to a CD or other external storage medium for long-term storage. Then it is a matter of deciding whether you want to use all or just part of an image, what you want to emphasize in an image, and how big you want the final image to be. Scanning and scaling (changing the size) often cause a blurring effect that must be sharpened for the image to look more in focus. Here is where the Image Editing panel in Fireworks comes to the rescue.

Enhancing a digital image with the Image Editing panel

The Image Editing panel (see Figure 1) has everything you need to produce quality images for the web.

Figure 1. Image Editing panel

This panel groups most of the commonly used image editing tools in one easy-to-find location. In this article, I will take you through the Image Editing panel's features and tools, and provide examples of how you can use them best.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Fireworks CS4

• Try
• Buy

Sample files:

• image_editing_samples.zip (ZIP, 1.5 MB)

Prerequisite knowledge

To complete this tutorial you should be familiar with basic imaging editing techniques for the web.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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