Textures
You can further enhance both your fills and strokes by applying textures to them. Fireworks provides textures from which you can set and apply in various levels of opacity. The default for texture is grain at zero percent. You can add textures to any fill.
Adding Texture to a Fill
Although fill and stroke properties are normally considered exclusive to vector objects, a marquee selection can have a fill applied to it that has the fill, edge, and texture settings:
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Select an object by using the Pointer tool.
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Choose a texture from the Texture pop-up menu or use an external texture that you created by choosing Other from the Texture pop-up menu and navigating to a texture file (see Figure 5.20).
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Enter a percentage in the Amount of Texture field or slide the Percentage slider to increase or decrease the percentage of texture intensity (see Figure 5.21).
Figure 5.20 The Texture Options pop-up menu.
Figure 5.21 Category, Feather, and Texture amount controls.
The texture percentage also controls the degree of texture transparency. Textures modify the brightness of a fill, but do not affect the hue.
Exploring Textures
To examine and tinker with the current set of Fireworks textures, follow these steps:
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Open the texture_types.png file from the Exercises/05 folder on the accompanying CD-ROM (see Figure 5.22).
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After you open this file, you can see that it contains 41 swatches to which I have applied the various texture types to a gray color chip of hexadecimal value 666666.
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You can modify and tinker with these texture chips by selecting them and changing their fill color and adjusting the percentage of their texture opacity.
Figure 5.22 The texture types at default percentages.
The texture types have been set at their default opacity percentages.