Adobe Flash CS4 Professional provides a number of features for producing impressive graphic effects. These features, along with the improved workflow of Flash CS4, open up an endless list of effect and production possibilities.

Besides the drawing features and video capabilities, these graphic effects make up a category of tools promoting expressiveness—the ability to enhance the look and feel of your project.

Here is a summary of a few of these important features:

• Graphics effects filters: Filters let you create more compelling designs by applying visual effects to movie clips and text. Filters are natively supported and rendered in real time by Flash Player 8 or later. With these filters, you can make objects glow, add drop shadows, and apply many other effects and combinations of effects.
• Blend modes: You can achieve a variety of compositing effects by using blend modes to change the way the image of one object on the Stage is combined with the images of any objects beneath it.
• Bitmap smoothing: Allows bitmap images to look much better on the Stage when they are severely enlarged or reduced. The appearance of these bitmaps in the Flash authoring tool and in Flash Player is now consistent.
• Runtime bitmap caching: Runtime bitmap caching lets you optimize playback performance by specifying that a static movie clip (for example, a background image) or button symbol be cached as a bitmap at runtime. Caching a movie clip as a bitmap prevents Flash Player from having to continually redraw the image, providing a significant improvement in playback performance in some scenarios.
• Copy and paste motion: Now you can copy and paste a motion tween, including all of its properties, to another object. You may also copy a motion tween and apply the properties using ActionScript 3 for code-based animation.
• 9-slice scaling and onstage preview: Allows you to specify areas on a symbol that will not distort when the symbol's instance is scaled on the Stage. Now the author-time preview displays a consistent view on the Stage.
• 3D rotation and animation of 2D objects in 3D space: Flash Player 10 extends the coordinate space of display objects by adding a z property and rotationX, rotationY, and rotationZ properties.
• Inverse kinematics: Flash CS4 enables you to create armatures that connect groups of symbols or sections of a drawing shape in a linked armature of movement. Armatures can be active at authortime for tweened animation across pose frames, or at runtime for user-driven animation.
• Pixel Bender filter effects: Flash CS4 lets you import custom-built filter effects created in the Pixel Bender toolkit.
• Advanced color control with Kuler: Flash CS4 includes the Kuler extension, which lets you easily create and save custom color palettes to the Swatches panel and to the web.

You can apply filters and blend effects in either Flash CS4 Professional using the Property panel during authortime or with ActionScript code at runtime.

Note: The ActionScript samples in this article are written in ActionScript 3 and must be used within an ActionScript 3 file. See the Flash 8 version of this article for samples that can be used in an ActionScript 1 or ActionScript 2 file. Also, if you have not upgraded yet to the latest version of Flash, you can check out the Flash CS3 version of this article.

Requirements

To follow along with this learning guide, you will need to install the following software:

Flash CS4 Professional

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge

This article assumes you are familiar with the Flash Professional workspace and have a basic knowledge of working with FLA files. An intermediate knowledge of ActionScript is required for the sections of this learning guide that discuss how to create graphic effects programmatically.

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