Subtitles of the Movie

Computers display graphics in either vector or bitmap formats and Fireworks works with both of them. Understanding the difference between vectors and bitmaps will help you understand much about Fireworks, let me provide some background about the differences between these two graphics families in this movie. To start, I need to mention that unlike previous versions of Fireworks, you don't need to deliberately switch between bitmap mode and vector mode, you can also as I've done here, mix bitmaps which is the photograph, vector objects which is this graphic with text objects all on the same canvas, switching to the appropriate mode is as simple as selecting the text tool or one of the vector tools or one of the bitmap tools here in the Tools panel. Let me start my discussion with vector graphics, as I have here. Vector graphics render images using lines and curves called vectors. These vectors include color and position information, if I zoom in on this graphic you'll notice that it's created or it's actually composed of a set of lines and curves, if I go back to my original graphic here and I zoom in on this vector object, you can see that I can actually take out the fill and this, render this as a line, line arc here. So this image here is defined by a series of points that describe the outline of the object. I can take my Subselection tool and actually modify these points. Editing sub elements of an auto shape may cause it to behave unpredictably is the error that I'm getting here, this is actually created using one of the auto shapes here in the Vector tools, but I can create other kinds of shapes here. I can also take this and fill it with different color so in some ways these vector objects are much more flexible than the bitmap objects, when you edit a vector graphic you modify the properties of the lines and curves that describe its shape. Vector graphics are also resolution independent which means you can move, resize, reshape or change the color of a vector graphic as well as display it on output devices of varying resolutions without changing the quality of its appearance, that's key. So if I zoom in on this vector graphic it will maintain its appearance and I can change the shape. The little anti alias thing you see there is Fireworks' way of rendering this accurately on the canvas, if I were to print this vector shape object I could print this at any size resolution and it would resolve or print cleanly. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate vectors is to compare them to bitmaps. If I go in and zoom in on this bottle for example you'll notice that rather than composed of lines and shapes, a bitmap is composed of dots called pixels arranged in a grid, your computer screen is a large grid of pixels and a bitmap version of an object the image is determined by the location and color value of each pixel in this grid, each pixel is assigned a color, a specific color and when viewed at the correct resolution, let me double click on the magnifying glass here to bring this out to 100 percent and when viewed at the proper resolution, the dots fit together like tiles in a mosaic to form the image, notice that I can't see the dots when I'm zoomed out at proper resolution. Now to edit a bitmap graphic rather than using the Subselection tool and simply modifying the nodes or points or lines or shapes, you have to modify the pixels themselves which are resolution specific which means that the data describing the image is fixed to a grid of a particular size and density. If I were to enlarge this bitmap graphic I would need to redistribute the pixels in the grid making the edges of the image appear ragged like you can see here. Displaying a bitmap graphic on an output device with a lower resolution than the image itself can also degrade the image's quality. So in summary, you'll use vector images and bitmap images for different situations, often times illustration or artwork or line work is done in a program like Illustrator or Fireworks vector tools. Scans of images or photographs are typically going to be bitmap images that you'll want to keep at a specific size and not resize them. The editing that will be done will be done in a program like Photoshop, although you can edit bitmap images in Fireworks it's not an ideal tool for this job, better to use Photoshop to manipulate the color and position of these pixels, Photoshop has specific tools for manipulating pixels that Fireworks generally lacks, however you can do basic things like erase pixels, select certain pixels using the lasso tool but Photoshop has far more sophisticated selection tools and then remapping tools for remapping the color of these pixels that you've selected. But more about working vector graphics a bit later including how to draw with vector graphics and how to edit paths and how to use the various tools here in the vector section of the Fireworks interface as well as more about creating bitmap graphics but for now let me move on to the next movie and talk about opening and importing different file types in Fireworks CS4.