Page 2 - I get 500 dollars!!!!!

Thank you for your input. I figure, hell, if the client has the money, and wants to go for the Photoshop, why stop him. I certainly won't be complaining. The more and more I play around with Fireworks, the easier I find tasks to be over PSP, though I admit my knowledge of these programs (especially of PSP) to be painfully limited.

The real question is, for me, is it worth the extra 150+ dollars.

*cough* in the corporate world the big guns have site licenses and because Adobe has acquired so much technology the licensing deals with Adobe, much like Microsoft, tend to work out better when dealing with tens of thousands of copies. The corporate world is also about tight budgets. No one is saying "well, it costs four times as much so it must be four times as good". Otherwise, your first job in the corporate world would have a shiny new Quad Core with a widescreen LCD instead of that old Pentium III with a CRT that was handed down to you from Bob in Accounting ...

Runs like 350 dollars and you get all the programs you need, like Photoshop, Dreamwaver, and Fireworks.

Thank you dbart, however I don't want to spend that much when I would never use Photoshop, or DreamWeaver. I would use DW, but I would never use any of the features they have. I'd rather have the simplicity of notepad. Allows me to edit HTML, CSS, and JS. it's all I need. And for Photoshop? Well I would prefer Fireworks...

Well I've been a Fireworks users since idk.. 2001? There's nothing that really comes close to it for web graphics in my opinion. For those saying it's a vector image editor - it isn't. It's a combination raster/vector editor and it does what its meant to do very well. It's very intuitive.

As a webdesigner I rarely use fireworks for graphics. Most the graphics I do as well as other designers and companies I have worked for are created in Photoshop. You might want to read up a bit more at some of the design forums as I know this one is mostly for programming. Photoshop supports slicing and the exporting of HTML and Images for the web as well. The new Fireworks does css which Photoshop does not offer yet but in the end I just code the css anyhow.

If you could stretch your money further you could get Adobe CS4 Web Premium, which includes Fireworks, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver and a whole load of other apps.

Personally I find Fireworks is very good for things like web buttons - and it can generate HTML, which I find handy for e.g. complex polygonal image maps - but the image stuff can be done in Photoshop.

I'm not very familiar with Paint Shop Pro but I believe Photoshop CS4 Extended does have several advantages over it, such as the 3D tools.
Also Photoshop CS4's has very tight integration with Flash CS4. E.g. you can import a Photoshop file into Flash and layers are preserved, effects are replicated and where they can't be, they are rasterised into images.