I'm a huge Macromedia fan. I think Fireworks is way easier and faster than Photoshop and can also handle most of what Illustrator does (without needing to touch Macromedia's Freehand).

But if you want to do print graphics then Fireworks is NOT the app to do it. It really is designed for screen resolution work.

You would be hard pressed to find a better combo than Photoshop/Illustrator. I use both of these daily in my productions...Illustrator for everything vector based (especially titles!) and Photoshop for everything else (stills, drops etc etc)

Macromedia makes excellent products as well but they are really web-centric screen based tools.

In the right hands - Adobe products are responsible for a ton of what you see daily from print to that billboard on the way home to those snazzy graphics on that show you just watched...they make good stuff.

Learning them is another story but time well spent.

Fireworks is strangely over looked for multimedia production imho (I'm not in the printing business btw).

Some years ago, it was a revelation for me, after previous Adobe only years: much better flexibility and productivity and intuitiveness as an integrated vector and bitmap multimedia tool.

It is also a killer combo with Vegas. Fireworks has some marvellous organization/export features i use everyday for video creation ( batch layers or frames export in particular). You can also work with a Fireworks multilayer 32 bit png document on one screen, make the modifications, save the current state and switch to Vegas to see the actualised result in you project, keeping everything open and fully editable (layers selection, colors, effects, vectors, etc.) . That's invaluable for me.

In fact, Firwworks was about the same revelation in graphical design that Vegas became in video editing later...

I sometimes think that Adobe's programmers are practicing for a career with Boris...

Personally, I can't stand the learning curve, but I view PhotoShop as a necessity. Haven't tried Firework, though.

My .02

Fireworks is outstanding for static graphic titles, masking, layering, multimedia content and video creation within Vegas, but in trying to make printable graphics I have had to use Photoshop.

Interesting spread. I'm torn! Most of my work is for the web, but I also need to output graphics for DVD sleeves and such like.

My Photoshop / Illustrator experience so far has always left me thumping the table. They just seem so unintuitive and the interface so tricky. My Dreamweaver learning curve was so much easier, which is why I was left wondering if Fireworks is the place to invest my time.

Keep those opinions coming please!

Back in the 60's and 70's, the saying was that "no one every got fired for buying IBM equipment." The same can probably be said for Adobe Photoshop. It is the standard, and has incredible third-party support (including millions of tutorials).

That said, there are several other well-known alternatives, besides Macromedia's offerings. The one I use is from Ulead (also known for their two DVD authoring programs, Workshop and MovieFactory). It is called PhotoImpact. It started out as a program that they created back in Tawain in 1989, and which they then OEM'd to Aldus. When Aldus was purchased by Adobe in the mid-1990's, Ulead bought back the program. They had a non-compete with Adobe, but when that ran out, they begain to enhance the product like crazy.

The interface is extremely fast, and it does many, many of the same things as Photoshop. The only things I really miss (compared to the full version of Photoshop) are the healing brush and the plugins. It also has awesome web tools for creating graphics for web pages (tools for things like rollover buttons, etc.). Thus, you get some of the features that Macromedia provides in their two tools.

The other option, with which I am not personally familiar, is Jasc Paintshop Pro. It gets amazing reviews.

Both the Jasc and the Ulead program are oriented towards photo output, and have very few pre-press features (like undercolor removal, for instance). These features are part of what make Photoshop so expensive compared to the "light" versions of Photoshop.