Can anyone who has both of there programs tell me the main differnaces and pros and cons, which is best for website design?

Thanks,

It depends what you want to do, and your skills....i found macromedia fireworks more simple than photoshop, to make slices, buttons, banners and others common tasks into the websites.....

You'll get highly differing opinions on this, but as far as I'm concerned, Fireworks is the superior product for Web design hands down. It is NOT superior for print work (in fact, it is generally useless, particularly when it comes to items being sent to press). But it's a vector-based program with reasonably powerful bitmap editing tools as well, and that makes all the difference. Photoshop has a distinct edge when it comes to bitmap images, but it's simply awful for vector.

Fireworks is a lot easier to learn, and the GUI is immeasurably better laid out than Adobe GUIs in general. I've not come across a single Photoshop filter that it couldn't handle as well (I'm sure there are some, but I've not seen them). The exporting engine is more efficient. Compression level/size to quality, Fireworks beats Photoshop across the board, but is particularly better with PNG format. Fireworks is also much more forgiving when making changes later later down the road within a design, because of its vector architecture. Whenever someone sends me a PSD, I immediately turn it into a PNG file and work up my Web pages in Fireworks. High resolution print material, nothing beats Photoshop, but for Web, Fireworks is clearly the best choice.

Just my opinion of course.

Hey the_pm... thought I would ask a question of you for your professional opinion. I have both Fireworks and Illustrator. I have used each rarely and want to begin getting much more involved in vector graphics. I want to choose one of the two to get serious with and buy some books on. Of the two, which do you think is superior as far as vector graphics, GUI and ease is concerned? THANKS!

GUI and ease - Fireworks
Power and functionality - Illustrator

But they are two different tools for two different jobs. I suppose you could do Web layout work in Illustrator, and in fact I know of some people who do so with some success, but it is missing critical bitmap editing features. So, if you're interested in learning about vector drawing and it will primarily be used on the Web, learn Fireworks, because you have your bitmap editing tools in the same package.

You can then take the skills you've learned in Fireworks, and learn the Illustrator GUI and its extended tools for print design work and logo work.

Thats good advice the_pm... I appreciate your opinion... and just to firm up one more question I have about a preference for either....

Which one would you pick for me to learn as far as logo creation? I feel this is what I will really get heavy into. Thanks!

Have you checked out GIMP? It's free. And not bad of a program. :)

I would have to agree with the_pm on this. Fireworks is a lot easier to learn and not any worse as far as design goes. I do think that Photoshop has more options as far as plug-ins and such go. But Fireworks is not at all an inferior project. Besides, it works nicely with flash.

Thanks for your opinions, I use fireworks and find it great - I just wondered if I should get photoshop but I guess I will stick with fireworks!

Thanks!

Thats good advice the_pm... I appreciate your opinion... and just to firm up one more question I have about a preference for either....

Which one would you pick for me to learn as far as logo creation? I feel this is what I will really get heavy into. Thanks!If you're going to get heavily into logo creation, without question Illustrator is the right tool for the job :)