Allrighty. Right-click on the following image, and select "save picture as." Browse to your desktop, and save the file under any name you want.
Go to Photoshop, and select "File>Open", and open up the picture you just saved to your desktop- and there it is, within your photoshop framework:
Now- pay close attention: For your flash animations, a full-screen image needs only to be 320X240 pixels. (More on this, later.)
Go to "Image > Size"
And change the image height to 240 (as you see above..) Click OK.
This bring our image down to the appropriate height, but we still have 15 spare pixels of width. Go to "Image > Canvas size."
Now, if you don't have image ready, just hit "ctrl-S" to save the image.
However, if you DO have image ready, hit "ctrl-alt-shift-S." This will bring up the "Save for web" window.
Make sure the file type is set to "JPEG", and the Quality is set to 50%. Save it under a different name (we'll get into naming conventions, later.)
We're done for now with photo shop. Exit the program, and when it asks you if you want to save your changes, click "No."
Open up flash, and voila- there's a pristine, empty stage for you to work with. Make sure you have the standard windows open, and hit "ctrl-R" to bring up the Import window. Navigate to your desktop, and select the picture you just saved.
Press "open", and your image pops onto your stage, and your library.
Now, here's where that "Align" window comes in. Click the three buttons highlighted, below:
Notice what happens? This automatically centers your imported JPEG, and then scales it to fill the screen- cool huh? But press the "Z" key, and let's zoom in...
Notice how pixilated and rough the image is. This just ain't gonna look good....
Look over to your Library panel, and make sure you have your imported JPEG selected. Click the little blue "i" icon at the bottom of your library.
In the popup window that comes up, make sure you have "Allow smoothing" checked.
NOTE- Take a close look at the compression that we got on that image:
This is one of the wonderful things about flash- you can cram 12 images into a filesize that would normally only accommodate one!
Press "OK", and let's take another look at the image close up:
Ah- it's still a tad blurry, but everything is smoother.
We'll get into animating images, next chapter, but for now, I wanna explain my previous admonition concerning full-screen images (320X240.)
I have had dozens upon dozens of flash animation presented to me to feature on Bushflash.com, and nothing galls me more than the following:
Flash presentation starts- first two images are fine:
And then alla sudden, the third image comes up:
Okay- can anyone tell me what's wrong with the overall thematic composition of this piece so far? Anyone- yes- you there at the back? Oh- just scratching your nose? Okay- anyone else? Hello?
Okay- the problem here is that the creator of this flash didn't think it was important to remain consistent with the sizes of the images they chose. If the image didn't fill the whole screen, they just scaled the image down and centered it, leaving TWO BIG HONKING BLACK BARS ON EITHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN.
Oh- I hear the creator saying "Well- I left those negative spaces, to make an artistic comment (black being so goth and cool, etc.) It was sorta like letter boxing- for just one image."
No- go stick your head down the toilet, and flush it a few times, to wash the stupid out...
You did this, because you were too damned lazy to find a full-screen shot of what you wanted to convey (which is sad, considering we're just looking for a 320-pixel width image.)
Simply put:
Please- please- please, and PLEASE again, spend the time required to find original and effective imagery for your flash animations, and KEEP THE SIZE CONSISTENT. Yeah- it sucks, sometimes, to spend hours scouring through image archives for just the right picture, but ya know- I've spent as much as three hours looking for a single image that conveyed exactly what was required, for the moment. Yeah- I could have gone with something that wasn't the right size, or was half-assed, message-wise, but here's the deal:
Anything worth doing, is worth doing well.
