Quite often, when searching for a relevant image to go on a new website we are designing, we’ll find one that’s almost right, but not quite! We might have a certain picture in mind but when we find it, the object in the picture is perfect but the colours are completely the opposite to what we wanted. Putting it into the design makes the image stick out like a sore thumb and the most important part - the content of the page - fades into the background.

We'll be changing the yellow hot air balloon to a red one

Read on to find out how simple it is to change the colour of a selected part of an image in Adobe Fireworks. In our example we’re going to change the yellow part of the hot air balloon from yellow to red. We’ll use the magic wand tool to select the area we’ll change and then a hue filter to choose the colour we want.

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Following on from our previous post: “How to make Animations and Animated Graphics in Adobe Fireworks“, we’ve now got the basic knowledge of making an animation in Adobe Fireworks. We can animate a graphic, moving it a small amount, each frame, across a series of frames to make the final result appear as if our graphic is actually in full motion.

Our tutorial today is going to cover the rest of Adobe Fireworks’ useful tools and commands for making animation even easier and more impressive looking! We’re going to use symbols and tweening, a method of animation that became popular in Adobe Flash. We’ll also take a look at onion skinning and distributing to frames, all techniques that are useful for animation in Fireworks.

Here’s what we want to achieve (click to see a bigger view):

Our stickman is going to move from A - B across 12 frames, and the waves will do the same but at a slower speed. Unlike our last Fireworks Animated Stickman tutorial, we’re only going to need to animate 2 frames (A - B) and Fireworks will do the tweening - which is short for inbetweening (doing everything in between frames A and B).

Read on to find out how simple it is to animate our surfing stickman…

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