Skip Main Navigation

Enter a query to search our site. Note that you can use "*" and "?" as wildcards. Enclosing more than one word in double quotes ("CSS Layout") will search for the exact phrase.

PHOTO MAGIC FOR ADOBE FIREWORKS CS3

These tutorials are no-hand-holding, straight out recipes for some of the dazzling visual effects you can achieve in Fireworks. The program Help files show you how to operate the software. The objective of these tutorials is to show you how to solve problems and communicate to you the sheer fun you can have with Fireworks while working toward your artistic goals. The effort you put into working through these exercises will be repaid by the rapid development of skills used by Web designers on a daily basis. Some are simple, some are fiddly, but all are great fun.

zipDownload the supporting files


Create a directory named PVII_PhotoMagic on your hard drive and unzip the working_images.zip file into it.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

SELECTIONS

The marquee tools are the basis of nearly all selective image manipulation in Fireworks. They behave in much the same way as similar tools in other graphics applications, so they may already feel familiar to you.

  1. Polygon Marquee selections
  2. Pen Tool selections
  3. Magic Wand selections
  4. EZ Knock Out selections
  5. Conversion selections

VIGNETTES

A vignette is an old photographic darkroom technique made popular in the late 1800's. Vignetting and fading photo edges is easily done in Fireworks, and there's more than one way to do it.

  1. Elliptical Marquee vignettes
  2. Vector mask vignettes
  3. Combination vector and bitmap vignettes

MASKS

Masking is a technique used to isolate parts of an image object. Because they are not destructive (they don't destroy the pixels they isolate), they enable you to change things later, with minimal wasted effort. In Fireworks, masks can be raster or vector objects.

  1. Clipping masks
  2. Paste inside masks
  3. Combination masks
  4. Paste as mask
  5. Alpha masks