We received great feedback regarding the awesome presentation by Alan Musselman of Adobe this past Saturday. Continuing on that theme, here is a great tutorial by Rodger Fuller on quickly mocking up a website in Fireworks.

This tutorial is actually a recorded session from Adobe MAX this past November. Very impressive stuff and shows you what you can do with this powerful tool that sometimes gets overshadowed (no pun intended) by big brother Photoshop:

http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f15383v1042

Don't get me wrong – I think Photoshop is a heck of a tool and the "Mother of all Image Editing Tools", but I think Fireworks does a more than adequate job as well. I don't think it gets near the attention it deserves, and it is why I'm looking forward to next month's presentation with Alan Musselman on Fireworks CS4.�?

But seeing as how I use Fireworks probably more than any other tool in the Adobe arsenal, I was looking for some effective methods to extract images from complex backgrounds using my favorite tool. Let's face it, the magic wand doesn't always "cut it" – whether you are using Photoshop OR Fireworks. Anyway, I was fortunate to stumble upon two methods which have radically changed the way I perform this method in Fireworks – and both use the nondestructive method of using vector masks.

Check 'em out here:

Removing background Images using Fireworks:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/removing_backgrounds.html

Removing backgrounds using Vector Masks:

http://www.tutorialsphere.com/tutorial/fireworks/photo-editing/332/removing-backgrounds-vector-masks

Hope this helps -
Kevin