Flash vs. Photoshop — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

Multimedia/Animation

Flash vs. Photoshop

This page's ID: 11208

Edit Post

Who can edit a post?	The poster and administrators may edit a post. The poster can only edit it for a short while after the initial post.

Your User Name:
Your Password:
Login Options:	Remember Me On This Computer

Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	I second Fig's observations. Flash came into being to do something revolutionary: render and animate vector graphics on the web. Nothing I know of did it before, and few apps have done it well since. They owned that niche. Vector graphics are by nature small and scalable. Flash earned a reputation of being incredibly fast. But of course there are graphic limitations to vector graphics. It's harder to draw with for one thing (and Flash has some pretty non-standard tools if you "grew up" with Illustrator). No special effects filters. People were accustomed to raster graphics in their conventional HTML pages. People spent years learning cool image techniques with Photoshop and Fireworks. People naturally went with the thng they knew. As soon as Flash supported it, they plopped raster graphics in their movies. And guess what? Those aren't small or scalable! Pretty, yes. Efficient, no. Plus, people had also spent years learning how to optimize graphics for the web. But, as Chris points out, Flash by default optimizes raster graphics (pretty well it seems), so to start with optimized files is a bad idea unless you know how to tell Flash to use the data as is and not optimize it any more. I've had good luck with png files from Photoshop (with the advantage of much nicer transparency masks than gif offers). Makes for very large fla files, but it's astonishing how small the compiled swf is. Pay no attention to the fla size -that's not what goes out over the web. But pixels is pixels. Compressed or not, you lose the vector advantage. Sometimes there's no avoiding it (hey - I'm a photographer! If I want to show what I do, Flash or not, I have to use raster images at some point!), but if you want to use Flash to it's absolute best advantage, try to do as much as you can with what it does best. And that of course it vector graphics. Oh yeah - and code. And as a final comment - Flash handles sound extremely well. But loads of sites I've visited are really inconsiderate with the sound capability Flash offers them. No designer shuold assume I want to hear their sound track. I learned that lesson myself with imbedded quicktime sounds on a site I did. When a woman suddenly became the focus of attention in a quiet reference library, I quickly heard some sounds myself!!! And I never forgot the lesson. Shhhhh. Don't feel you can't use new multimedia capabilities. Just start with the assumption that I [b]don't[/b] want to hear it, and give me the option to turn it on if for some perverse reason it turns out that I want to! Loading...
Options:	Enable Slimies Enable Linkwords

« Backwards — Onwards »

Show Forum Drop Down Menu