Adobe Fireworks has a few more control settings than Photoshop when it comes to certain things, and gradients are one of them. In Photoshop, you have your typical Radial gradients, linear, angle, reflected and diamond. You can also create transparent gradients, but in Fireworks, you can do all of that, as well a a few other options.

Go into the Properties panel and choose the tab that allows you to change the fill. You can fill an object with nothing, a solid color, patterns, a gradient, or you can select more options. Here you can choose from a bunch of different gradient options, such as folds, ripples, etc. You can also choose from a bunch of different color presets, like you can in Photoshop, but here you can also feather the gradient, and preview it live, and you can add a … Read More »

Yesterday, I covered some basics regarding glow effects and how to use them to your advantage. Today, I will cover some more advanced techniques that will help you to achieve some really cool effects.

I created a new document with the dimensions 1024 x 768 and filled the background with black. I selected a font, which you can use anything of your choosing, but I chose Null Free, found here. I typed in the word design. Then, just like the lines from yesterday, I created an outer and inner glow and set them to the blending mode of Hard Light, just as in this tutorial, but in this case, I set the colors to pure white.

Then, create a new blank layer above the type … Read More »

Glow effects can really add drama to your designs and really make them stand out. Contrast is key here, so it is always a good idea to use a really dark, or even black background. You can add these types of effects to anything such as text, lines, shapes, etc.

To do this, open up a new document inside of Photoshop. For our purposes, I created a document that is 1024 x 768. I filled the background layer with black, and then I held down Shift + Command (Ctrl on the PC) and hit the letter N to create a new layer.

For glowing lines, take your pen tool, and create a path in the shape or contour that you want. I hid the black layer so that you could see the path easier. Go to the … Read More »

This is a really cool feature found right inside of Adobe Fireworks. What is great about this feature is that when you blend the colors, they are safe for the web. Many times when I am building site composite, or a piece of web work I would like a mix of two major colors that I am using in the site, or a mix of two colors found within a photo. This is really easy to do inside of Fireworks with the Color Blender found within the Color Palette.

All you have to do is go down to the bottom of the Color Palette. This is where you can control all of the settings for the mix of the two colors. The different blocks are the number of steps in color gradation from your first color choice to the second one. … Read More »