Preparing Images for Flash with Photoshop CS2

Adobe Photoshop CS2 is an exciting upgrade to this premiere image-editing program. When you're preparing bitmaps for use in Flash, Photoshop adds some extremely useful and powerful Web features that make saving high-quality JPEGs and PNGs a snap. The PNG-24 format is a great format to use with Flash, because this file format has lossless compression and can support an alpha channel (or transparency mask).

Tip 

Officially, Flash 8 supports import of alpha channels in PNG, PSD, or layered TIFF files. If you are creating text and graphic files in Photoshop that don't require any special masking, working on a transparent background and saving the file in any of these formats for import to Flash is sufficient to preserve transparency. However, in our tests, PNG and TIFF (with layers preserved) format files resulted in much cleaner alpha channels when imported to Flash than PSD format files.

Web Resource 

For a step-by-step example of how to use adjustment layers and create a mask layer in Photoshop CS or CS2, refer to our archived coverage of "Preparing Images for Flash with Photoshop CS." This section from the Flash MX 2004 Bible can be found online at www.flashsupport.com/archive.

Photoshop has excellent selection and masking tools for the most complex images. Although some third-party plug-ins can make the task a littler simpler, some basic know-how with Photoshop tools can also go a long way toward completing your task with ease.

Color Management in Photoshop

Many strategies exist for color calibration on desktop computer systems. Macintosh computers have had a leg up in this area of graphics creation and output ever since the development of ColorSync. Apple's ColorSync software provides one of the most complete system-level color management solutions for desktop publishing. Unfortunately, while Windows systems do include ICC^[1] profile support, it's not as comprehensive as Apple's ColorSync system. Since the release of Photoshop 5.0, it has been possible to specify and attach ICC color profiles to most image file formats. In a nutshell, ICC profiles describe the color capabilities of a given input or output device, such as a computer monitor, printer, or scanner. When an ICC profile is attached to an image, the profile tells the application that is using the image how the colors in the image should be interpreted. If every program in your workflow supports ICC profiles, then, theoretically, this provides a consistent display and output of all graphics.

However, while Photoshop and most page-layout programs recognize ICC profiles, the majority of Web development applications do not. Some Web browsers do not support embedded image profiles, although Apple has proposed many ICC tags to make color management a reality for the Web (visit www.apple.com/macosx/features/colorsync). More important, Flash does not support ICC profiles. Neither does the current implementation of the PNG-24 format. The JPEG file format is the only current Web image format that supports embedded profiles. Moreover, ICC profiles typically add about 500 to 800 bytes to an image's file size.

This is why the Save for Web feature (introduced with Photoshop 6.0) and its Preview Menu are so invaluable. They enable you to see how the JPEG, GIF, or PNG looks without Photoshop Compensation.

If you work primarily with Web or screen graphics, then you should use Photoshop's Color Settings presets (Photoshop 6 or higher only) to quickly switch color spaces. For Web work, always use the most appropriate localized Web/Internet setting — in the Color Settings dialog box available from the Edit menu, click the More Options button to access Web/Internet settings for North America, Europe, or Japan. For ColorSync management on the Mac, choose ColorSync Workflow. On the PC, choose a setting that best matches your printing needs (ColorSync is an Apple-only management system).

^[1]Note: ICC stands for International Color Consortium. To learn more about the ICC, visit www.color.org.