Adobe Fireworks CS3 Tutorials
Creating Bitmap Graphics / Working with Bitmap Graphics
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Fireworks CS3 / Creating Bitmap Graphics / Working with Bitmap Graphics)
In this movie, I provide an overview of working with bitmaps in Fireworks CS3. The bitmap section of the Tools Panel over here, the second section from the top, contains bitmap selection and editing tools to edit the pixels of a bitmap in your document. You can select a tool from the Bitmap section here. Let's take the Eraser tool, and if I drag it across the canvas, I can erase a section there, I can also draw on the canvas. You can also create bitmaps directly by using the Bitmap drawing and painting tools. Let's open up a new document and here's my Pencil tool, and I can create a new bitmap graphic simply by choosing a color and brush size, and now I can just paint, using the Brush tool on my canvas. I can also create bitmap objects by cutting or copying and pasting pixel selections, or by converting a vector image into a bitmap object. I'll demonstrate this technique with a vector object here, and now let's choose, with the vector object selected, Modify, Flatten selection, and now this is a bitmap object that I have here. Notice that I can take this and erase portions of if or draw over portions of it there, so that vector object is now a bitmap object. When you create a new bitmap object, it's added to the current layer. In the layers panel, with the layers expanded, you can see a thumbnail and name for each bitmap object under the layer on which it resides, so if I open up the Layers Panel by choosing Window, Layers, notice that I have two bitmap layers here. There's my original graphic, and that's the vector object that I converted to a bitmap. Although some bitmap applications consider each bitmap object a layer, Fireworks organizes bitmap objects, vector objects, and text as separate objects that reside on layers. So this is a really handy way to keep track of your various bitmap objects. To make it easy for you to get started editing photos as quickly as possible, Fireworks has assembled the most commonly used tools for photo editing, all in one place: the Image Editing Panel. Let's go ahead go to bitmap 1 here, my photo, you can access this panel by choosing Window, Others, and then Image Editing, and so I have a checkmark next to that one. That will bring up this Image Editing panel here. You have the following tools: Red eye removal, Crop, Rotate, Blur, Sharpen, Dodge, and Burn, and various categories. And let's see you have all your transform tools here: Scale, Skew, Distort, Free Rotate. Let's go ahead and select this bitmap so that those are not grayed out, but there's my Scale tool that I can very quickly go in and scale my image, or distort it, such as rotating it, or skewing it like so. You've got your Transform commands: Rotate 180 degrees, Rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise, and 90 degrees clockwise, Flip horizontal and Flip Vertical, you've got your Adjust Colors, below that, let me flip this back the way that it was. There we go. You've got your Adjust Color commands: Invert, Curves, Brightness, Contrast, Auto Levels, is one of my favorites. Notice the difference between that; let's undo that, Control Z, and that, yeah that Auto Levels is a good one. It makes it a little more saturated, a little bit better normally on most computer displays. You've also got brightness and contrast settings here. Filters: Unsharpen, Sharpen More, Unsharpen Mask, Add Noise, and so on. The tools contained here in the Image Editing panel are the same tools you'll find in other places in Fireworks. For example, under the Modify Transform Menu you'll see a lot of these same commands: Skew, Distort, Rotate 180 degrees, Rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise, Rotate 90 degrees clockwise, however, the image editing panel simply presents some of the most commonly used tools all in one panel for your convenience. So you've got a variety of bitmap transform tools, transform commands, adjust color commands, filters, and then a variety of view options, editing guides, locking, unlocking guides, snapping to guides, show and hiding rulers, and grids. Now if you're familiar with Photoshop you can see that Fireworks has many of the same tools and capabilities you'll find in Photoshop, but in a much more focused and manageable workspace. So that'll wrap up this quick overview of some of Fireworks' bitmap tools and menu options. My aim here was to give you an idea of the depth of Fireworks' bitmap editing and selection capabilities, and how easy it is to quickly get up to speed in using them to work up your photos and other graphics.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Fireworks CS3 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33836 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-42-9 |
| Release Date: | 2008-01-25 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 93 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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