5.4. Advanced Color and Fills Color is one of the most primitive, powerful communicative devices at your disposal. With color, a skillful animator can engender anxiety or peacefulness, hunger or confusion. She can jar, confuse, delight, soothe, entertain , or informall without saying a word. Color theory is too large a topic to cover completely here. What you do find in this chapter is a quick introduction to basic color theory, as well as tips on how to work with color in Flash. You'll see how to change the colors of the shapes , lines, and images you create with Flash's drawing tools; how to create and reuse custom color palettes ( especially useful if you're trying to match the colors in your Flash animation to those of a corporate logo, for example, or to a specific photo or piece of art); and how to apply sophisticated color effects including gradients, transparency, and bitmap fills. 5.4.1. Color Basics The red you see in a nice, juicy watermelonor any other color, for that matter is actually made up of a bunch of different elements, each of which you can control using Flash's Color panel: -
Hue is what most people think of when someone says color . Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet are all hues. Out of the box, Flash offers 216 different hues. You can also blend your own custom hues by mixing any number of these basic 216 hues. -
Saturation refers to the amount of color (hue) you apply to something. A light wash of red, for example, looks pink; pile on more of the same color and you get a rich, vibrant red. -
Brightness determines how much of any given color you can actually see. A lot of light washes out a color; too little light, and the color begins to look muddy. At either end of the spectrum, you have pitch black (no light at all) and white (so much light that light is all you can see). In between these two extremes, adding light to a hue creates a tint . For example, if you add enough light to a rich strawberry-ice-cream pink, you get a delicate pastel pink. -
Transparency refers to how much background you can see through a color, from all of it (in which case the color is completely transparent, or invisible) to no background at all (in which case the color is opaque ). In Flash, you set the transparency (technically, the opacity ) for a color using the Alpha field. 5.4.2. RGB and HSB Color doesn't exist in a vacuum . The colors you get when you mix pigments aren't the same as the colors you get when you mix different colored lights (which is how a computer monitor works). Artists working in oil paint or pastel use the red-yellow-blue color model, for example, and commercial printers use the cyan- magenta -yellow-black color model. In the world of computer graphics and animation, though, the color model you use is red-green-blue , or RGB . This model means that you can tell Flash to display any color imaginable just by telling it precisely how much red, green, and blue to display. But if you don't happen to know how much red, green, and blue makes up, say, a certain shade of lilac, Flash gives you three more ways to specify a particular color: -
HSB . You can tell Flash the hue, saturation, and brightness you want it to display. -
Hexadecimal . You can type the hexadecimal number for the color you want Flash to display. Because hexadecimal notation is one of the ways you specify colors in HTML, you can use hexadecimal numbers to match a Web page color precisely to a color in Flash. -
Selection . In the Color Panel, you can drag your cursor around on the Color Mixer tab's Color Picker (Figure 5-30) until you find a color you like. This option's the easiest , of course, and the best part is, after you decide on a color, Flash tells you the color's RGB, HSB, and hexadecimal numbers (all of which come in handy if you want to create a color precisely, either in another Flash animation or in another graphics program altogether). In the next section, you see how to specify a custom color using Flash's Color panel. DESIGN TIME
The Six Commandments of Color | | Whether you're using Flash to create an interactive tutorial, an animated art short, a slick advertisement, or something else entirely, you need to be aware of color and how it supports (or detracts from) the message you're trying to get across. Color is at least as important as any other design element, from the fonts and shapes you choose to the placement of those shapes and the frame-by-frame timing of your finished animation. Although the psychology of color is still in its relative infancy, a few color rules have stood the test of time. Break them at your own risk. -
Black text on a white background is ubiquitous for a reason . Any other color combination produces eyestrain after as little as one sentence . -
Color is relative . The human eye perceives color in context, so the same shade of pink looks completely different when you place it next to, say, olive green than it does when you place it next to red, white, or purple. -
For most animations, there's no such thing as a Web-safe color . Web-safe colors the handful of colors that supposedly appear the same on virtually all computers, whether they're Mac or Windows, laptop or desktop, ancient or newwere an issue in the old days. If you chose a non-Web-safe color palette, your audiences might have seen something different from what you intended (or might have seen nothing at all, depending on how their hardware and software were configured). But time marches on, and any computer newer than a few years old can display the entire range of colors that Flash lets you create. Of course, if you know for a fact that your target audience is running 15-year-old computers (as a lot of folks in other countries and in schools are), or if you suspect they might have configured their monitor settings to display only a handful of colors (it happens), you probably do want to play it safe and stick to the Web-safe colors that Flash offers. (To display Web-safe colors, choose Window and, in the pop-up menu that appears, turn on the checkbox next to Color Swatches. In the Color panel, click the Options menu and then, from the pop-up menu that appears, select Web 216. The Color Swatches tab displays 216 Web-safe colors.) -
Contrast is at least as important as color . Contrast how different or similar two colors look next to each otheraffects not just how your audiences see your animation, but whether or not they can see it at all. Putting two similar colors back-to-back ( putting a blue circle on a green flag, for instance, or red text on an orange background) is unbearably hard on your audience's eyes. -
Color means different things in different cultures . In Western cultures, black is the color of mourning; in Eastern cultures, the color associated with death and mourning is white. In some areas of the world, purple connotes royalty; in others, a particular political party; in still others, a specific football team. In color, as in all things Flash, knowing your audience helps you create and deliver an effective message. -
You can never completely control the color your audience sees . Hardware and software calibration, glare from office lighting, the amount of dust on someone's monitora lot of factors affect the colors your audience sees. So unless you're creating a Flash animation for a very specific audience in which you know precisely what equipment and lighting they'll be using to watch your masterpiece, don't waste a lot of time trying to tune your colors to the nth degree. |
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