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I worked with Illustrator (CC 17.0) and GIMP rather than Fireworks to create my image (Im comfortable with Illustrator and I’m just trying out GIMP for the first time). Illustrator actually has a nice detailed optimization panel that I never knew existed! I used the magic want tool on the paintbrush and the pallet to remove the background in GIMP, then brought the images together to create my composition. I noticed the wand tool in GIMP doesn’t seem to be as accurate as Photoshop’s; it tends to leave a fuzziness around the image so it needs some additional clean up, but it works and still seems to be quicker than the lasso tool for me. I lowered the opacity of my background image to make the text a little easier to read. (The background is actually solid white- not transparent). I went as big as I could with the file (960w by 400h [px]) and was able to optimize it to a JPEG with a size of about 60KB without losing much quality. Thanks for looking!