Optimizing Images

Even if you never create a graphic in Fireworks, image optimization is a fantastic feature that you're sure to want to use for your web graphics. Image optimization is the art of making sure that your graphics look as good as possible while keeping them small, so that your web pages load as fast as can be.

With Fireworks, you can open an existing graphic in pretty much any image format, and easily tweak it for appearance and size. While you're playing with the settings, you can preview the results in up to four different formats at the same time to help you choose the settings that are best suited to your graphic. Using Fireworks, I've been able to drop the size of a jpeg file from over 100Kb to under 10, while maintaining all of the image quality. Optimization can have a great impact on the speed of your web site.