Which Software Should I Use?
There is a lot of free-ware and inexpensive softwares available in the market, but regardless of your choice almost always you have to follow the steps explained in the left aside of this site. You have to do the slices, select, optimize, save, and finally export them into other software able to refine the job. Among the most popularly used are a mini compressor made by SMP, and AVS Converter. Then, there also are Fireworks and Photoshop from the Adobe family which are widely used as proffessional softwares due that they cover all the steps to complete the image work for the web. We are going to concentrate our demostration on those softwares.
So, Which one should I use? Photoshop or Fireworks?
While many prefers Photoshop since is a software dedicated to create and process images, Fireworks which was born exclusively for web, as Fireworks MX Macromedia, in the same way Flash or Dreamweaver did. Until recently Fw had only vector capabilities, now that has get free of many of the unwanted traits of Macromedia and has also bit map capabilities start to gain popularity. At the same time that Photoshop is more and more used for web design since has become better for slicing images and is able to export it, as an html or xhtml table, but also is able to write the CSS.
Personally I rather Fireworks, since is able to design a whole page, place the buttons, establish the links, write, and title your images and page, organizing and set all the navigations, etc. while still having all capabilities that have Photoshop. But, the real plus of Fireworks is that is able to export directly into Dreamweaver.