Fireworks 4 offers two significant introductions to its export capabilities. At the other end of the scale is the new ability to selectively enhance the quality of JPEGs. You do this by saving image selections as JPEG masks to which you can apply completely different optimization settings. In the past if you mixed continuous-tone photographs and text you had to either keep compression low or export to GIF if you wanted your text to be legible, now JPEGs can handle these jobs far more efficiently. For many frustrated users this will be reason enough to upgrade.
Selective optimization enables text quality to be maintained within highly compressed JPEGs.
Fireworks 4 has also taken the opportunity to give users more control over the export process itself. Further changes have been made to Fireworks' workflow capabilities. Often the same actions are applied to multiple images and Fireworks has always offered batch processing to help automate the process. In addition the dialog now offers access to all scripts that have been added to the Commands menu which effectively enables fully customizable batch processing. Another area of strength is Fireworks' integration into wider production workflows.