Subtitles of the Movie

Continuing from the previous movie my review of new features in the CS3 version of Fireworks, we come to the Flash-based slideshow feature, the new commands. Create slideshow allows you to create a Flash slideshow and you don't have to know how to use Flash at all. You simply select a folder with images in it here in the album section of the create slideshow dialog, click on the plus button. You can either process all the open files or all the currently open files or you can choose a custom collection of files. Let's just go ahead and select all of these files right here in this sample pictures folder. Click on done and then OK to bring those into the create slideshow and select those sample pictures. Notice that the list of pictures is here and you can go ahead and add slideshow options such as slide transitions, captions, filters, the duration of each slide and how long it will be visible, the interval between the slides as well as a transition. Fade, dissolve, fly, iris, photo, rotate, squeeze, wipe and zoom. There's quite a number of them. Go ahead and set your export options including your export path. Let's go ahead and save this to my Fireworks CS3 folder. Click on create and then Fireworks will process all these images, automatically batch processing the required thumbnail and full-size images that are optimized for the web as well. Once it's finished processing, we go ahead and launch the show in your browser. Now the Flash player that Fireworks creates will automatically play back all those images. Notice that it created the thumbnails as well as the full-sized images here and there are transitions between the slides. You can also pull up the slides in any order by scrolling through the slide thumbnails and clicking on the thumbnail to see the full image in the image viewer here. New in Fireworks CS3 are also new sub-layers to help you organize the structure of your working layers in a document. You can see these by opening up the window layers panel. And notice that for layer two here I have sub-layer, layer 2B and 2A. You can create these sub-layers here. The bottom of the layer panel, create new sub-layer. And then move elements from one layer to another layer anytime and also create multiple sub-layers and group them. You use the layers panel to create and organize layers as you need them. With Fireworks CS3 you can directly import native files from Photoshop, achieving a whole new level of functionality between these two programs. Fireworks CS3 includes seven commonly-used Photoshop blending modes, these being dissolve, linear burn, linear dodge, vivid light, linear light, pin light and hard mix. You can now also move content from Fireworks CS3 to Flash CS3 Professional by quickly copying any objects here on the canvas or by directly importing a Fireworks PNG file into the Flash library. Important structures are maintained, including multiple pages, shared layers, hierarchical layers as I have here, frames, nine-slice scaling settings and many many of the effects that you have available in Fireworks. This makes it much easier to prototype your websites in Fireworks but then develop the websites in Flash. You can also open Illustrator files in Fireworks while preserving all the hierarchical layers, patterns, linked images, text attributes, transparency and much more. Fireworks also contains export options for exporting to Adobe Illustrator 8.0. You can simplify file handling in Fireworks and with an Adobe Creative Suite with the Adobe Bridge, Adobe's next-generation file browser. Here is a sample of Adobe Bridge. You can efficiently, using the Bridge, browse, tag, search and process your images using Bridge and Fireworks together. It means that you can take advantage of XMP metadata in your files. Adobe XMP, which stands for extensible metadata platform, is a technology that assists the user in adding file information to files served in the PNG, GIF, JPEG, Photoshop and tif formats and facilitates the exchange of metadata between Adobe software and other systems that support the XMP metadata standard. Notice over here to the right in Adobe Bridge you have a preview. Down below you have your metadata information as well as your keywords. You have a folder browser to the left. As well as filter options down here in the lower left. Adobe Bridge then greatly facilitates the handling of files that you plan to use across a variety of applications within the Adobe Creative Suite.