How to Import Graphic in Adobe Flash Lesson 2

[Music Playing]

We do not have always to create all of our graphic elements inside Flash using the tool set. We can import lots of these elements straight into the program and that is what I would like to take a look at in this lesson.

Now, I have started off with a blank file and you can see it, it does have a blank library. You can create a new empty file by just going up to your File Menu, choosing New and go ahead and select the Flash File ActionScript 2.0 since that is what we will be using for most of this series. Now, I will just hit Cancel since I have already got a file here and I will change one setting, I am going to make our stage size a little bit bigger. I can just click on the Size Button down the property window. I am going to change the stage to 600 pixels width and that will match some of the graphics that we are going to importing. Now, I have got my library panel open and I can see that it is empty. If you do not have you library panel accessible, you can get it right under the windows panels. It is one of the main panels right up at the top and as we said before, that is where all our reusable elements in the file are going to be stored.

So, let us go over and import some things, we will go up to the File Menu, I will choose the Import Selection and you can see we got a fly out menu with few different options. Now, I will be focusing on the first two here, Import to Stage will take a copy of whatever we have imported, drop it right on the center of the stage in the current available layer and Import to Library will only put that item into the library. A lot of the elements that we are going to bringing in are already reusable so they will go into the library regardless of whether we choose stage or library. Let us just try out stage first. Now, when your import dialogue comes up, the first thing I want to take a look at is the Type Menu at the bottom here, we will open that up and we can see that we have a large variety of different types of files that we can bring in to the program. This consists of image, sound and video formats and we can sort them just by saying All Image Formats or All Sound Formats. Now, within that list, you can see a lot of very common items like jpeg, gif or tif, you can also some uncommon ones like tga or silicon graphics image file. So on most cases, whatever kind of image file you have, you will likely be able to import it in to the program.

Looking at the files we have to choose from, I have selected the lesson three folder in the part one folder of out project files and I have got quite a few different elements to import but I am going to start with the three circuit scans we have here. Couple of jpegs and a tif file, now I can select an individual file to import or I can shift select a group of them and import them all at once. We will click the Open Button and since we had import to stage selected, you can see that the objects are in place right in the center of my stage and also they have been placed inside the library as reusable elements. We can only see one of the circuit images because they are all stocked upon top of one another so I am just going to click out here in my movie to de-select everything and then I will just select one of the image files and we can grab them one by one, separate them out. And there, you can see that all the images were in place inside the file.

When I mentioned that they are reusable, that basically means that we can go right in to library and grab anyone we want and pull another copy out without affecting the file size for final Flash movie. Now, I can also just leave things in the library for later use so I am going to select this two circuits, this is circuit two jpegs and I am just going to delete them out of the current layer for now so we can focus on just two of our images.

A quick glance at the property window shows us there is not a whole lot we are going to be able to do with these images right away. I am showing it X,Y, and a width and height property which implies that I can move this around the screen to different positions and I can also change the width by either just typing into the box here. I will type in 150 and enter and there you got a half size image or I can actually use the free-transform tool on it with all the different handles. Everything is working, we can scale the image up, we can rotate it, we can use the skew tool on it and we still got a pretty good image although some of this transformation might break the image up just a little bit. We should be aware of how big the original file size is because when we take a bitmap graphic and scale up too big, we were going to get lots of this distortions.

Now, I am going to show this by grabbing a hold of the corner handle and scaling this up, I am just going to drag all the way up to the screen until my graphics is really big. And you can see that the pixels are starting to break up and is really starting to look like a much more distorted image. If you want to use an image at a large size, it is a good idea to be thinking about this before hand and plan a large graphic with lots more pixels in it for use and it will scale up a lot better. I am just going to remove this transformations real quick by going up to the modify menu, I will choose transform and at the bottom we have a remove transform option and that will clear away all the rotations and the skews that we have done on this image.