Fireworks vs. Photoshop

Moot point? Maybe, since Adobe's swallowing up Macromedia. But after using Fireworks exclusively for a year I've been using Photoshop CS2 a bit recently and I really want to say it's gotten a lot better. Really, I do. If Fireworks won't be supported in the future, then it makes sense that at some point I'll switch back to Photoshop, and I want it to be the best product for what I do.

After using PS CS2 to tweak and export some images, let me put my conclusion this way: heaven help us.

I opened a grayscale image that's vector based and has no gradients whatsoever, adjusted the color balance to make it a red-magenta tone and tried exporting it as a GIF. The image is 600px by 230px, to give you a sense of what we're looking at. Adorable little Photoshop told me it was going to be a whopping 40k file. "Crazy!" I thought and tried adjusting every setting possible to reduce it. I was able to get it down to 23k or something, if I could count on my audience being outright blind. JPG settings didn't help, nor did PNG. With a muttered "this can't be right" I moved the image over to Fireworks.

What do you think I found? It was pretty much impossible to get this simple image formatted as a GIF to be anywhere close to 40k. Even using GIF Exact, it came out to like 24k and didn't look any different from the GIF setting Fireworks used initially (for a modest 14k file size). So man - I feel sorry for the poor sap using Photoshop and putting up with bulky images. Let's even assume that it is possible to get the file size down to something more manageable using Photoshop - why put yourself through that??

I was disappointed too to see that simple convenient touches are still missing from Photoshop. If I use the marquee tool to select part of the image and then click on the crop tool, what else could I want but for the box to change into crop lines? Fireworks get this, Photoshop doesn't.

Okay, Photoshop has filters and a "healing" brush. Those things certainly come in handy at times. For everything else Fireworks get the prize. So here's my vote - however inconsequential - that Adobe either fuses all the best parts of Fireworks onto a cleaned-up Photoshop or lets Fireworks continue living in some shape or form, maybe by selling it. Otherwise, well my money's just fine where it is, say thankya.