Subtitles of the Movie

Fireworks has something called Live Filters, which were formerly known as Life Effects. These are enhancements that you can apply to vector objects, bitmap images, and text elements. But let me take this opportunity to introduce these Live Filters to you while we're focusing on bitmaps. Live Filters are found in two locations. There is a Filters option here at the top of the interface. There is also a Filters drop-down menu here in the Properties Inspector. You'll notice that there are more options for the filters here in the Properties Inspector including Noise, Shadow Glow, Sharpen, and then something called Photoshop Live Effects. Some of these effects are duplicated up here in the Filters menu: Adjust color, Blur, Noise, Other, and Sharpen. So I'll be covering those Live Filters that you apply down here in the Properties Inspector a little bit later in the tutorial. Let me introduce these Filters to you by running through some of the more important of these filters up here in the Main menu. Perhaps the most important one I've already covered is the Auto levels. Notice that this image right here definitely improves when you do the Auto levels. There is without the Auto levels, and there's with the Auto levels, a little bit brighter. Next, you've got in the Adjust Color section: Brightness, Contrast, which is another important one. I've covered this one previously. I usually add both Brightness and Contrast to my scanned images, and images that I pull off the Web. You also have, under the Adjust Color, Curves, which allows you to very precisely modify your channels: RGB, red, green or blue. For more details on the Curves filters, see the Fireworks CS3 Help. Next under Adjust Color, we have Hue Saturation, where you can adjust the hue, saturation and brightness. Then you have Invert, which basically makes a negative; inverts all those colors giving you a negative filter effect. And then lastly is the Level Setting, which allows you to, in addition to set your Auto Levels, you can customize, personalize your levels. Basically there are some eyedroppers here that will let you select shadow color, mid-tone color, highlight color. Again, for more details on how this Levels Panel works, see the Fireworks CS3 Help section. Next we come to the Blur filters. There are quite a number of them including Simple Blur, Blur More, Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Radial Blur, and Zoom Blur. And again, probably the best way to orientate yourself to these filters is to experiment. Notice that many of them have their own dialogs where you can adjust the amount and quality of the Zoom Blur. Let me demonstrate a few more of these. Gaussian Blur is probably the one that I use the most, and that has a Blur Radius setting to adjust the amount of the blur that you're adding, so you can preview the effect as you are adding more or less blur. Here is Motion Blur. We can adjust the angle and the distance to give you different kinds of effects here. So those are the Blur Filters. Underneath the Blur Filters we have the Noise Filter. Only one option here: Add Noise, and then the amount of noise that you want to add: 400 maximum. One is minimum. In addition to a color option, next in the Filters Menu, you have the Other setting here, including Convert to Alpha and Find Edges. And Find Edges gives you quite an interesting effect there. Let's undo that. Continuing down my list, we now get to the Sharpen Filters. I typically will sharpen my images after I scan them or get them off of a Web site. Scanning tends to blur images a little bit and I find that sharpening them up a little bit makes them look better. You can also choose the Sharpen More, but I find that sometimes that's a little bit too much sharpening. And the last option there is Unsharp Mask. Here you have three settings: Sharpen them Out, Pixel Radius, and Threshold. Let's go ahead and adjust these. Move this out of the way, and you can increase the sharpen amount. That's probably a little bit too much there, if you look at his hair right there. The Pixel Radius of the sharpening, and then the threshold value. Here in the Adobe Help for Fireworks CS3, Unsharp Mask, it says that it sharpens an image by adjusting the contrast of the pixel edges, and this option offers the most control, so it's usually the best option for sharpening an image, and here you have an example, the original and then after sharpening you can see there that this looks quite a bit better. That'll wrap up this section of the tutorial on creating Bitmap graphics. In this section you've learned how to work with bitmap graphics, how to create bitmap objects, how to edit photos with the Image Editing panel, how to retouch your bitmaps, and then a little bit about these Live Filters, those are that are especially related, or pertinent, to bitmap objects. Let me now move on to the next section of the tutorial, Selecting and Transforming Objects.