Lesson 1. Bitmap Editing

Macromedia Fireworks 8 is both a bitmap editor and a vector drawing program. By combining these drawing methods into the same application, Fireworks gives you a very powerful and versatile set of tools.

Bitmaps are images that are composed of pixels. As with paint on a canvas, you can't just remove a mistake you need to erase or "paint" over the mistake. Vector objects are images composed of mathematical lines and therefore can be moved and reshaped or even deleted with minimal effort.

Fireworks combines the look of bitmap images with the flexibility, control, and editability of vector graphics in a single environment. You can create soft, fuzzy drop shadows on objects and then change the shape of the object, and the drop shadow is re-rendered for you to match the new shape.

In this lesson, you will use bitmap tools to create images for the home page in your Web site.

Editing a bitmap and manipulating a vector object are two distinct operations. The Fireworks Tools panel is divided into a set of vector tools and a set of bitmap tools to make it easy for you to choose the proper tools. If you have a bitmap image selected and you choose a vector tool, Fireworks automatically switches you to vector editing mode. If you have a vector object selected and you choose a bitmap tool, you are switched to bitmap editing mode if there is a bitmap object on the canvas. If you don't have a bitmap object, the pointer changes to the universal No symbol a circle with a diagonal line through it to alert you; Fireworks won't let you use a bitmap tool on a vector image. The switching is so seamless, you might not even realize that it has happened.