Now the major graphics software vendors—Adobe and Macromedia—have decided to enter the Web image market. Adobe's entry, rather prosaically named ImageReady, is billed as an extension of and complement to Photoshop. (Editor's Note: ImageReady is now part of Photoshop, and is no longer available as a standalone product.) Macromedia is positioning its program, Fireworks, as an all-in-one Web graphics tool which can be used in a production work flow alongside Photoshop and Macromedia's other Web tools, Dreamweaver and Flash. We reviewed a beta version of each product, both of which will be priced at $299 upon release.

Each shows considerable promise. Each also displays a strong advantage over Photoshop, even as beta software: vastly superior image compression. The GIF image above, for example, was composited in Photoshop but optimized for the Web in Fireworks. It comes in at 27K, as compared to 39K in its Photoshop version (ImageReady turned in a 28K version of virtually identical quality). (Editor's Note: re-optimized in Fireworks 3, the image is now under 11K.) That translates to a 30% smaller file, a savings which rapidly becomes significant on a site of any size. Fireworks and ImageReady are very attractive for their compression technology alone. (And Photoshop, although an essential program for any sort of image work, seems conspicuously lacking in this department by contrast.)

Both of these new programs offer a lot more than compression, of course, but both also suffer from a few pre-production glitches. ImageReady's interface is almost identical to Photoshop's, and indeed it has much in common with that program. (Perhaps too much in common—many designers would have preferred to have ImageReady's superior compression rolled into the $995 Photoshop, rather than having to buy a separate, add-on program. Adobe's rationale is that a separate, smaller program was needed to take full advantage of the Web's rapid development.)

ImageReady offers a "LiveView," dual-document window that lets you compare the original image to its optimized version by clicking a tab—it's quite clean and efficient, and anyone used to Photoshop will feel right at home in this program. ImageReady also offers layers-based animation (though we couldn't get the tweening feature to work properly), image mapping, batch processing, and cross-platform gamma preview and correction.

Fireworks is a slightly more ambitious program—for instance, it provides built-in JavaScript rollovers, in addition to animation and image mapping. Or at least it will—the rollover implementation was inconsistent in the beta version. Fireworks also has a slightly more complicated interface. There is no "LiveView" window, but the program will let you compare four different versions of an image with its Export Preview feature. And Fireworks has a slightly more efficient compression engine than ImageReady, particularly for JPEG images.

The bottom line: each program will probably be worth the asking price for its compression alone, especially once the beta bugs have been ironed out. (Note: Macromedia has just released the final 1.0 version of Fireworks; we'll have follow-up coverage on this version in our next review.) Which product designers prefer will basically be a matter of taste and experience—ImageReady probably integrates better with Photoshop, but Fireworks may be the better stand-alone program.

(Reviewed June 4, 1998)