Subtitles of the Movie

In Fireworks you can both open and import files, the two operations are related and similar but are not the same and can cause confusion so let me review each operation in this movie. You can open files created in other applications or file formats including Photoshop, Freehand, Illustrator as well as different types of file formats including CorelDraw, BMP, EPS, JPEG, GIF, animated GIF and many more. To get an idea of how many different file formats you can open in Fireworks, choose File, Open from the main menu and then there is a Files of type dropdown menu, right here that gives you a list of supported file formats, freehand files of a variety of different file extensions, Photoshop PSD files, GIFS, JPEGs, WBMPs, TIFs, BMPs, Adobe Illustrator files, EPS files, Rich text format files, those are like from WordPad, word processing format, HTML files of a variety of type, XML, HTML, JSP, PHP, PHP3, and so on. ASCCI files, QuickTime images, JPEGs, and several others in the bottom there that you can't read. Let's go ahead and open up this Photoshop file, it's going to ask me some options here, Photoshop file open options, including the resolution and the size, let's click OK. Now let's open up an Illustrator file, I have an Illustrator file right here, Bedlam, notice the extension, .AI, and when I open this, Fireworks is going to give me the vector file options dialogue which you'll get for many vector types of file formats, Illustrator's a vector program, it's going to create vector files, here I have an opportunity to scale this image to any size that I want, set the resolution to any size that I want, click OK. So when you open a file format other than the PNG file using this File open dialogue you're going to create a new Fireworks PNG document or PNG document based on the file that you open. You can then use all of the features of Fireworks to edit the images. You can then either select Save as to save your work as a new Fireworks PNG file or as another file format. This is relatively new, older versions of Fireworks didn't let you save it as other formats, it'd only let you save it as the default PNG, notice however I can save this as a BMP, GIF, animated GIF, Illustrator 8 file, JPEG, Adobe Flash, SWF file, Flattened PNG, Photoshop, TIF, or WBMP, Bitmap file. However, saving the file in its original format will flatten the image to a single layer and will eliminate your ability to edit the Fireworks specific features that you add to the image including frames and slices, layers, behaviors and other things that I'll be covering in this tutorial. Now you can also import images. The difference between opening and importing is that importing will actually add it to your existing file, so if I choose File, Import, with this file open let's go ahead and bring in the Fish document, I still get this Photoshop file import options dialogue where I can set my size, let's reduce this down to 120 pixels width here, 72 DPI, constrain proportions, notice that I get this icon with my mouse right here which is the edge of the image indicating I can indicate to Fireworks where I want to place this image so I placed it right there so in contrast to opening, importing places the image in the existing file that I have open, you can also drag, copy, and paste vector objects, bitmap images, or text created in other applications into a Fireworks document. I've gone ahead and copied some objects in Photoshop let's go over to this file here and then choose Edit, Paste and the object comes right in here into the canvas, you can also drag and drop vector objects, bitmap images or text into the Fireworks canvas directly from any application that supports dragging. One of these applications is Microsoft Word for Windows and I'm going to drag over some text from my word file right here onto the canvas. Now this text was quite large and then I have some other text that's much smaller so I'm highlighting it and dragging it over and it looks the same so the formatting is lost that I formatted over in Office but it will bring it over. It will also allow you to drag and drop Freehand 7 content or later, Flash 3 or later can also be dragged over, so here's a clock object that I've drawn in Flash, I've selected it all and now let's go over here to File new and create a new Fireworks document, 400 pixels by 300 pixels or so, 72 DPI and now let's simply drag this from Flash over here into Fireworks and there it is, notice that all of the pieces that I had over in Flash have all been combined together so it's now just a solid bitmap but it's easy to bring stuff over. Compare that to here, notice that these are all individual objects in Flash so I've lost the ability to treat those as separate objects but it's pretty easy to drag stuff right here into the Flash workspace. You could also drag and drop objects from Photoshop 4 and later, Illustrator 7 and later, Internet Explorer 3.0 and later as well as netscape Navigator 3 and later or CorelDraw 7 and later. So there you have a summary of the differences between opening a file in Fireworks, importing objects from other applications into Fireworks or dragging and dropping objects into Fireworks, let me now move on to the next movie and review how to save Fireworks files and a bit more about this native file format that Fireworks works with, the PNG file format.