Using Advanced Bitmap Color Manipulation

Introduction

As most users know, in Flash you can't modify anything about a image - say for example, its blending mode - to simulate what Adobe Photoshop or Adobe After Effects does with images.

But there's also something that many people don't know about images and Flash. Flash has a quite impressive "channel manipulator" window that allows you to modify some of the images' (and objects') colors on-the-fly without really modifying an image. Unfortunatelly it's not really magic - for example, you can't mix the color channels or use complex formulas, like in Photoshop's Filter Factory - but it's almost there.

I think there's only one occassion where I've seen this special property being used - in a Flash movie I saw a long time ago. Really sad, since it allows many features and, better yet, without using addittional bytes for new images.