Using Advanced Bitmap Color Manipulation - Page 15

Conclusion

This is it. There's a bit more that can be tried - combining the same image two times (with a 50% alpha on the second image), a lot more "embossing" ways, more hue tricks, etc - but I'll leave it up to you to try and play with the settings.

One question that may be tricking you is "Why would I use these settings, if I can do all of this manipulation on Photoshop?". Well, the answer is simple - file size, and animation. These tricks, if used in flash, can produce some fine animation - grayscale images turning to green hue images, or a imaging fading in a bright white instead of simply fading away. And also, it allows you to use the same image in lots of ways - with color modifications between them.

In fact, I was doing a Flash menu that would feature an image on 5 different color schemes. What it did was loading a random external movie - which, in this case, was rather undesired. So, using this "special" color tricks, I simply made 5 different symbols, each one with a different "color" applied to it, and made the movie select and show one of them. Way easier - and smaller, since the original image was grayscale. We could even combine all of these samples I've done in one movie - it would still be the same size, 8kb, with only some bytes used for the animation data.

Also, these color manipulation tricks can be applied to any Flash object - buttons, movie clips, text and the alike. I used bitmap images so I could show how powerful it is.