First off, hello to all. Been looking for a good forum site on web design for awhile. Hopefully I can answer some questions and get some answered here.

So anyway, I've been searching around for what the best graphics programs are for what I'm wanting to do in the future. First off my focus is website design so naturally I will be creating graphical images, modifying digital pictures and creating icons and logos. My current graphical specialty is photoshop which has done me well but never got very good at creating anything from scratch, doesn't help that I'm not extremely artistic. I think that photoshop is great for photo editing, duh...but what does everyone generally use when staring at a blank canvas?

You can't go far wrong with the macromedia offerings, fireworks, flash, dreamweaver e.t.c. All can be downloaded in free trials from their site http://www.macromedia.com/ .You already use photoshop so that is a help as well.

Oh and welcome to the forums.

Well, photoshop is IMO the best for designs, also works hand in hand with Photoshop Imageready. Macromedia products are also of high standards, not to fond of fireworks though, but to be honest I havent really used it.

Hi Nahele,

I use fireworks myself, and I think it's very good. It's quite easy to come up with something creative from a blank canvas using it's vector tools, but you can also do photo-editing too. I can't give a comparison with photoshop because I don't know it as well.

Here's a sample of what you can do using fireworks.

obviously you have had a lot of experience with fireworks gringo but how does a novice go about doing work like that in fireworks??????????????

The link I gave is to a site from which you can download the .png files. If you download them to your computer you can open them in fireworks and see exactly how each effect was created.

In addition to that, there are many tutorial sites for fireworks (there are even some on the ultraweaver website).

Thanks for the advice. I've used fireworks a little when I got macromedia suite but never really grew fond of it. I love flash and use dreamweaver to code all my html because it allows me to see everything right there as I type. Maybe I'll give fireworks another shot.

I'm really impressed with what you can do in Fireworks!!! I'm new to this, but I can see where I could go with this program. Thanks for the insight.
Sassa

Photoshop is the answer. I dont know better image editor and maker.
Powerful thing, for sure. Thumbs up.