Adobe Fireworks

Adobe Fireworks, known as FW for short, is a bitmap and vector graphics editor. It was originally developed by Macromedia, which Adobe acquired in 2005, and aimed at web designers (with features such as: slices, the ability to add hotspots etc.). It is designed to integrate easily with other former Macromedia products, such as the popular Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash. It is available as a stand-alone product or bundled with CS3. Version 8 was also bundled with Macromedia Studio 8.

The emphasis of Fireworks is on vector editing, similar to Adobe Illustrator, with limited bitmap capabilities. This is opposite to the approach used by Photoshop, which is primarily for bitmap graphics with limited vector editing features. Vector objects in Fireworks can be resized with no loss of quality, just as in Adobe Illustrator. A range of Macromedia FreeHand's vector tools were incorporated into the release of Fireworks 8. Bitmap objects suffer a similar loss in quality whether resized in Fireworks, Adobe ImageReady or Photoshop.