Compatibility between Flash and Photoshop

Certain visual attributes can either not be accurately imported, or, after they are imported, lose their ability to be further edited in the Flash authoring environment. The PSD Importer provides you with several options to import and place artwork to best maintain its visual appearance and editability. However, certain visual attributes cannot be preserved. Use the following guidelines to improve the appearance of PSD files imported into Flash:

• Flash supports only the RGB color space, and not the CMYK color space, which is common in printing. Flash can convert CMYK images to RGB, however, colors are better preserved if you convert the colors to RGB in Photoshop.

• Flash can import the following photoshop blend modes, and maintain their editability: Normal, Darken, Multiply, Lighten, Screen, Hard Light, Difference, and Overlay.

  If you use a blend mode that Flash does not support, you can rasterize the layer to maintain its visual appearance, or remove the blend mode from the layer.

• Flash cannot import Photoshop Smart Objects as editable objects. To preserve the visual attributes of Smart Objects, they are rasterized and imported into Flash as bitmaps.

• Flash can only import the first frame of Photoshop Video layers.

• Image and Fill layers are always rasterized when imported into Flash.

• When importing objects containing transparent areas as flattened bitmaps, any objects on the layers behind the transparent portion of the object will be visible through the transparent area—assuming the objects behind the object containing transparency are also being imported. To prevent this, import only the transparent object as a flattened bitmap.

  To import multiple layers and maintain transparency without having any visible remnants of the layers behind the transparency, import the PSD file using the Bitmap Image With Editable Layer Styles option. This will encapsulate the imported objects as a movie clip, and use the movie clip's transparency. This is particularly useful if you need to animate the different layers in Flash.