Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks Difference in Compression

Written by inAm from http://www.temptingmagazine.com on January 7th, 2010 | 1 Comment

Talk about Web Designing and your mind goes directly to Adobe Photoshop. I myself use Photoshop as my priority software for designing needs. Now question is why not Adobe Fireworks? Which itself is a remarkable design tool. I am a Software Engineer and i cannot tell whats difference between these two so i looked for it on Internet and found some comparisons of which ill discuss the compression capabilities of both.

Below are the experiments done by a designer friend and you can tell by the results that Adobe Fireworks is better than Adobe Photoshop.

PNG Compression

For testing purpose, We used an un-compressed image with transparency and used Photoshop to export the image to PNG-24 with transparency and the resulting file size is about 352 kb. Then we used the same image and exported it to PNG-32 with Fireworks. The file size is about 332 kb. Visually, they both look the same (at least to me). In term of file size, the image exported with Fireworks is about 20 kb less.

GIF Compression

Next we exported the image to GIF 256 colors, adaptive, with no dither. The results are: Fireworks = 88kb, Photoshop = 92kb. That is 4 kb less. Also, they don’t look the same. I prefer the image exported with Fireworks because it has more image details.

JPG Compression

Now, we are going to try the JPG compression with a different image. We exported the image with Photoshop to 60% quality JPG and the file size is 80 kb. Then we exported the same image with Fireworks to 80% quality JPG and the result is 72 kb. Both exported images look pretty much the same, but Fireworks beats Photoshop by 8 kb in this case.

Please note: Fireworks and Photoshop have different compression technology. 80% compression rate in Fireworks is relevant to Photoshop 60% compression rate.

So what’s the big deal here?

You will probably be thinking whats the issue here?! its just few kilobytes. Well it does make a remarkable difference, let me give you an example.

For instance, i upload an image using Fireworks and reduce the size by 20 Kb. Now my daily visits on average are around 16,000  now after calculation 20 kb x 16, 000 = 320, 000 kb. Yes 320 Megabytes of bandwidth can be saved with just a compression of 20 kb. Now just imagine how much bandwidth i can save if i compress all images using Fireworks. This will also definitely help load my website faster.

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