Exporting Graphics from Flash

Sometimes you have artwork in Flash that you'd like to use in another program. Perhaps it's a single image that you want to place on a web page, or maybe it's an entire animation that you want to save in a format other than Flash's SWF format. In either case, it's easy to save that artwork in a format that other programs can use. As you might expect, Flash plays especially well with other Adobe programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fireworks.

Design Time: Using Bridge As a File Manager

A Flash chapter that discusses different graphics file formats isn't complete without a mention of Bridge, Adobe's program for managing media files of all types (Figure 10-11). If you got Flash as part of an Adobe Creative Suite collection, you probably have Bridge installed on your computer. If you think you're perfectly happy managing files with Mac's Finder or Windows's Explorer, you don't know what you're missing. Bridge is much more powerful and customizable than either of those handy and necessary utility programs. Because Bridge is devoted to media files and because Adobe has the proprietary key to some of the most important file formats (Photoshop and Illustrator), Bridge is a more powerful graphics program than your typical OS utility.

Like Finder and Explorer, you can select a file from a thumbnail in Bridge, and then launch a program to open it. But Bridge is much more versatile and flexible when it comes to organizing media files and showing you the files you want at a given moment. Bridge tracks all sorts of information about the photos, graphics, videos, and sound files on your computer, and you get to decide exactly how those details are displayed. For example, if you manage a large collection of photographs, Bridge excels at managing photo's descriptive metadata. (Cameras automatically store details about a photograph in the photo file. That includes details like the date a picture was snapped or edited, the exposure used, and the type of lens. As a photographer or photo archivist, you can also add other metadata tags to photos to make them easier to find in searches.) Bridge gives you the tools to read the metadata in photos, and to find, sort, and view photos based on those details.

There's not enough room here to fully describe Bridge, but here's a short list of some of the things it can do:

• Organize media assets including photos, graphics, video, and audio files.

• Show media files from different computer folders in a single catalog.

• Preview Flash SWF files, while using the file catalog.

• Compare and preview most media files.

• Show/hide/find files based on criteria that you provide.

• Automatically import, name, and store photos from digital cameras and card readers.

• Run automated tasks from programs like Photoshop.

• Manage the tags (metadata) embedded in photos and other graphics files.

Figure 10-11. Bridge is Adobe's program for managing, organizing, cataloging, and previewing media files of all flavors. You can customize the program to show the details you need for your media files.

To Export graphics from Flash, go to File→Export, and then choose either Export Image or Export Movie. Flash opens a box similar to Figure 10-12, where you can name your file and choose its format. After you click Save, Flash displays another box, where you can choose options specific to the movie or image file format you selected. The complete details for exporting single images and animations from Flash are covered in Chapter 20.

Figure 10-12. You can export single images and animated sequences from Flash and save them in file formats compatible with other programs. For the complete details on exporting, see page 669.