Moving from Photoshop to Flash and Effective PNGs

Summary

Aside from photo editing (the subject of Chapter 13), you’ve pretty much encountered all the graphical asset creation related to building an interface in Flash at this point in the book. Don’t get the wrong idea though; you’re far from finished. I just barely touched on animation in this chapter, and in the next few chapters you’re going to learn much more on the subject.

You learned the following lessons in this chapter:

• PNGs are the best way to bring transparent raster graphics into Flash.

• Vector graphics are generally better than raster graphics for animated effects in Flash. The opposite is true when the vector object is so complex that it starts hindering playback performance. In this case, it’a a good idea to convert to raster or experiment with Flash’s new runtime bitmap caching.

• Combining vector and raster graphics and effects can help achieve unique and widely diverse effects.