Flash CS3 colors tutorial

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This is part of the Flash tutorials.

Learning goals

Learn to deal with colors

Prerequisites

Flash CS3 desktop tutorial

Flash layers tutorial

Flash drawing tutorial (at least some of it)

Quality and level

This text should technical people get going. It's probably not good enough for beginners, but may be used as handout in "hands-on" class. That is what Daniel K. Schneider made it for...

It aims at beginners. More advanced features and tricks are not explained here.

Color types overview

In Flash there are three kinds of colors

• Normal colors (solid)
• Gradients (linear and radial)
• Bitmaps

Drawing with bitmaps

Color panel - bitmap colors

Importing a bitmap

There are two solutions:

• You can just paste into the library from the clipboard. I.e. if you see a nice (and copyright free) texture on the Internet: With Firefox (1) View image, (2) Copy Image, (3) CTRL-V into Flash
• Save the image on your computer then click on the Import button in the colors panel.

Using a bitmap

• You can use the bitmap either as stroke or as fill color.

Adjusting "gain size"

With the free transform tool you can ajust how a bitmap will be applied. You can change:

• Size, i.e. whether the bitmap is applied as is, or reduced or magnified in x, y direction or both
• Rotation
• Skew (a kind of distorsion)

Select the Free Transform tool, then

• Click on the fill or stroke
• Play with the handles (if the bitmap is big, you may have to search for these handle way out of the stage !)

Gradient Transform tool on bitmaps

Note: I have the impression that there may some bugs (i.e. the tool acts strangly when use twice with several instances of the same bitmap).