Topic: Pixelated PNG images in Flash CS3

Hi guys

I know this has been asked many times, and I did make a search and read all I could find about this, but nothing seems to work and it is driving me up the wall: I am producing a little Flash banner for our company website, and I have PNG screen shots I would like to show and zoom into. Now I have imported my screen shots in my Flash library, have right-clicked on each of them to set their properties, checked "allow smoothing" and set the compression to "Lossless (PNG/GIF)".

When I size my screen shots down (they are of a fairly big size, so that I can zoom into them), the images are pixelated. Anyone has a miracle fix for this?

Thanks in advance.

I suspect a dpi issue : try it at 72 dpi, or 96, depending on the monitor, and let me know (I don't have Flash CS myself,
I have a fair idea of what's happening here though).

I can't help you either way but I'm curious.... are they pixelated as in they have lost resolution (resized down) or pixelated as in all the original pixels are visible but they're just ...err squarish?

I tried to duplicate your issue with my Flash 8. Here's what I came up with:

HTML | SWF | FLA

I don't see any pixelation, maybe I'm missing something?

I think it's a mismatch between display resolution of the image and physical resolution of the flat screen.

Some browsers like IE handle this poorly, so my guess is that on Windows, you will get this problem if your screen is at 96 dpi in hardware,
and your images at 72, or the other way round (less marked).

Thanks all for your replies.

Arthurio: it's more like a loss of resolution, the texts are illegible, the images lose their sharp edges.

zavaboy: thank you very much for you examples; I am starting to think that something is not rendering Flash very well, because in your examples, the edges are not very sharp either (on both my laptop screen and my additional LG monitor)... It is like the refresh rate is not quick enough... But it is not the same problem as in my example. What picture format did you use? PNG-8 or PNG-24? What is the size of your original image? THanks again for your help.

argo: if this is the case, how do people create crisp, high resolution Flash anims? I think I see your point, but I have some pressure to create high quality imaging and this is bad news

Also, I have made some test of importing PSD files directly into Flash, which sorts the problem out a bit but now my images look all smoothed out, not crisp at all...

Kimmy, just to finish what has been started : have you actually tested my tip? I mean, with one sample image?

Sherlock Holmes stylee, eliminate what doesn't work, for one,
and people probably do that thanks to the filtering / anti-aliasing on low resolution images - 150 or 300 or 600 dpi doesn't change anything in display
when the resolution of your monitor is limited to - something.

Please note also that there is a "Windows wide" setting with this dpi thingie - for fonts size. It's in : display settings (right click on the desktop),
last tab to the right, advanced button, general tab -> dpis.

I could explain details or post links about the reasoning behind, but you know, promise to TP, etc. and I consider his demand more than fair.
So for now, consider fiddling with the setting over there FIRST and figuring out if it works NEXT (takes 10 minutes) my 2 cents.

[OT but matters]
With these in mind, on my side of the continent, this is a time I understand that I have no choice but enter my bubble, lock it, and quit mentionning the "fight club"
altogether - which I will not be able to do for it is my core activity 7/7 for the weeks to come. So, as you seen on chat, you know where to find me
should you need a hand or ten - don't hesitate. Some things, even I can't believe and I have SEEN them so you do not want to know.
[/OT]

I tried with both 72 and 96 dpi images, and the problem stays the same unfortunately... As for my Windows settings, the default dpis setting is 96dpi. Is this what it would be? The text issue was only because the texts were embedded in the image - sorry, I should have mentioned. I am not having any issue with the anti-aliasing of the text so far.

1100x1300 PNG-24