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First Tutorial Posted!

By on October 19, 2005 in Design & Development

Finally! Last night I uploaded my first tuto­r­ial to the pixel forge sec­tion of the site. It’s a Fireworks tuto­r­ial that dis­cusses image back­ground removal using a mix of vec­tor and bitmap tools and func­tion­al­ity newly avail­able in Fireworks 8 (specif­i­cally, the Marquee to Path fea­ture). You can find the tuto­r­ial here:

Removing Image Backgrounds With Fireworks 8

If you have any ques­tions about that tuto­r­ial then please ask them here in a com­ment to this post. If you have requests for new tuto­r­ial you can post them in a com­ment here as well or send them directly to me through my con­tact page.

I have other tuto­ri­als near­ing com­ple­tion includ­ing the “Why Choose Fireworks” arti­cle I “announced” on Macromedian Scott Fegette’s blog. The arti­cle is almost done but part of that arti­cle dis­cusses Fireworks work­flow advan­tages and mask­ing is def­i­nitely one of them. Instead of detail­ing the steps in that arti­cle and length­en­ing it need­lessly, I decided to write a full fledged tuto­r­ial and link to to it in the arti­cle instead. Now that it’s pub­lished I can go back to fin­ish­ing the “Why Choose Fireworks” arti­cle as well as my adap­taion of the Photoshop water­mark­ing tuto­r­ial for SlideShowPro users as well as sev­eral oth­ers that are in vary­ing stages of completion.

Enjoy the new tuto­r­ial and post your comments!

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8 Responses to First Tutorial Posted!

  1. Jim Babbage November 30, 2005 at 11:11 am #

    Excellent tuto­r­ial, Stephane! Well writ­ten, detailed and easy to understand.

    Reply
  2. Stéphane November 30, 2005 at 12:11 pm #

    Thanks very much for your kind words Jim! Much appre­ci­ated :-) I wish I had more time to fin­ish the other I have started more quickly… they’ll get pub­lished even­tu­ally ;-)

    Reply
  3. Alan Musselman December 8, 2005 at 11:12 pm #

    You need to post this in http://​www​.fire​works​guru​.com/​f​o​rum

    Reply
  4. designdog February 24, 2006 at 12:02 pm #

    Thanks for the tuto­r­ial. I really want to like Fireworks. I really do. But I must point out that you can do the same thing with Photoshop using a layer mask, and in fewer steps. And, since they are on the same layer, you can do things with blend modes, trans­parency, etc. that you can’t do in FW.

    What is miss­ing in the Fireworks com­mu­nity is tuto­r­ial and doc­u­men­ta­tion of the fea­tures unique to Fireworks, things that Fireworks can do best. Instead all that I see is Photoshop wannabees.

    Here is the future: make the graphic in Photoshop; make it use­ful for the web in Fireworks. and they will “talk” to each other the way that PS and Imageready do now.

    There s just too much redun­dancy in these apps…

    –ddog

    Reply
  5. Michel Bozgounov March 7, 2006 at 9:03 am #

    Very good tutorial!

    Just tried it, worked like a mir­a­cle! Very use­ful, too! :-)

    Thank you!

    I only maybe am unable to grasp the end of the arti­cle, about how to change the color of the ring, using the Ruby Mask technique…

    [quote]
    …you can set its fill color to red and change the object’s Blend mode to Overlay
    [/​quote]

    How do I change the blend mode to overlay?

    :-)

    Thanks, Michel

    Reply
  6. Stéphane March 7, 2006 at 2:03 pm #

    Hello Michel,

    You can change the blend mode to over­lay in either the Property Inspector or the Layers Panel. The Blend Mode drop down is right besides the Opacity con­trol in both places.

    By the way, the Ruby Mask tech­nique is not for col­or­ing the ring but sim­ply to be able to *see* it when you edit the vec­tor mask shape on top of it.

    Thank you for your kind words!

    Reply
  7. Michel Bozgounov March 8, 2006 at 9:03 am #

    Thanks, Stephane!

    I’ve found it, but still unable to repro­duce the effect by myself… maybe miss­ing some step. I’ll look closer at the work files again one of these days… i have a lot of work lately and barely have time to see some­thing new… :(

    I am glad, though, that I’ve man­aged to find 5 free min­utes to com­plete your excel­lent tutorial!

    I use Fireworks since ver­sion MX, and am very happy with this pro­gram! It’s light­weight, it’s smart, its inter­face is intu­itive and easy to learn, and to cre­ate the per­fect web graph­ics it’s more than pow­er­ful! :-)

    I am happy there are so many users around the world that like it and use it every­day in their work or leisure tasks! :) ))

    Have a nice day!

    M.

    PS Should we expect more tuto­ri­als in the future? :-)

    Reply
  8. Stéphane March 8, 2006 at 10:03 pm #

    Yes, I have a few more tuto­ri­als in the works but not much time to work on them these days. I’ll get them out as soon as they’re ready ;-)

    Reply

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