Exporting to Flash with transparency

[Michael_Kallman@adobeforums.com]

Hello all,

Excuse my ignorance if this topic has been discussed before. Using Photoshop, mainly to edit graphics in connection with my Macromedia Director productions, for many years I upgraded to CS and I am just learning how to use Illustrator in general and to export Illustrator originals as Flash files as well.

The thing is that I've used to import simple graphics to Director as Flash files as the size of such graphics are so small and can more easy run when you convert a Director movie to Shockwave. The thing is that I do not work in Flash and as I was more interested only to be able to create and use Flash graphics I was very glad to discover the option to export an Illustator file as SWF (Flash).

The workflow is to open a bitmap grahic in Illustrator, export it as SWF and the import it in Director. So far no problem at all. But as I uesed to import generic Flash graphics before I could set the "ink" of sprites in Director to Background Transparency. That way all tru RGB-white (255,255,255) in the graphic was transparent.

My problem is that those exported from Illustrator doesn't behave that way. All white areas are instead solid, no matter if I set them transparent in Director or not. I don't know if I'm off-topic here, but if there are some procedure or setting when exporting the Illustrator graphic to a Flash one that will produce a Flash-file I can import in Director with the option to get the transparency I'm after I would be more than glad to see it happen. That way I'm not dependent on more software as I would like to use the Adobe family of tools to most editing pruposes.

(sorry about the length of the posting, thought I had to give the appropriate back ground to my question)

Regards
Micke

[John Mensinger]

Michael, it actually sounds as though you may have more experience in this area than I do, so these are just my thoughts on the subject.

For raster images (bitmap graphics) I intend to take into a Director project, I get the best results by saving as PNG in Photoshop. This way, I set up a transparent background in Photoshop, save as PNG, and in Director, the transparency is recognized. I haven't used Director's Sprite-level Ink settings ever since going this way. My graphics look good and transform/tween nicely in Director without distorting. This is essentially the same as using Fireworks, (in which PNG is the 'native' format), to prep raster images for use in Director. I simply prefer Photoshop to Fireworks.

Regarding Illustrator's SWF export, I also use that in much the same way, but only to prep vector graphics...especially text objects that I plan to animate. They also come into Director with transparent backgrounds and animate crisply. Honestly, I never tried that route with a raster image. It is interesting, though, that in my experience, if I export a white-filled vector object to SWF from Illustrator, the whole thing comes into Director transparent, so Director IS indeed reading pure white as transparent in my workflow, which seems to contradict your description of the results you're getting, (the only difference being that I'm referring to vectors while you're talking rasters).

Is it possible that the white in your exported graphics isn't truly pure RGB white, (255, 255, 255)? I know that if I want to export a white-filled vector to SWF for use in Director, I only have to change one value to make it come in non-transparent, (255, 255, 254), so the slightest variation is picked up by Director's "engine."

Again...just babbling about it...

Let us know if you make any new discoveries.

John