.jpg .bmp .png witch is best and how to

[elcandi]

flash mx 2004
Ok I have built a website for rimsnrocks.com, the pics of rims provided were of exilent quaility, in a cros off .bmp, .jpg and .png as well.

I know about enlarging pics and and keeping track of pixil counts and bytes. I made sure the pics were edited properly, and when putting the site together in the flash stage the pictures were beautiful.

Now Im not great at actionscript not yet anyway, but I have got the gist of flash.

I made sure in library the pictures were gif png format to not loose quality, and when I compiled the .swf i left the .jpg at 100. I ended up with about a 2 meg movie saving it in the highest quality settings, but the pictures came out looking terrible.

Nothing I did made them look any better when the movie was finished, I went ahead and did some shrinking down of the images anyway to lower the file size, ran a report, found there just aot of pics.

Now does anyone know what I can do to improve image quality?

I was also thinking about using the load external feature to lower the movies file size on all the pics of rims in it.

Does anyone know if that would increase picture quality?

[madzigian]

did you edit the image properties for each image and uncheck the "allow smoothing" option?... The only other thing i would suggest is to optimize the images in Photoshop and save them, then import them at ACTUAL size into Flash. So you don't have to scale them up/down or whatever...

[elcandi]

I had the same idea, I was hoping not to have to go that route, 10 rims with 2 angle shots each thats 20 pic to re edit on top redoing the transparency.

But I notice the pixilation accurs when I do the scaling, I had assumed that if I left the pictures a bit larger then need, then scalling them down would have no effect, but I see it happen before my eyes, do you know if flash 8 has fixed this problem?

[madzigian]

you won't have to re-do any transparency in Flash. IF you scale the images down or up, you'll have to make some adjustments there. But once you edit the images in photoshop and save them (which takes MAYBE 2 min per image), you just open your Flash file, select the image in the library and go into it's properties. Then choose UPDATE and you can simply update the image currently in your library, with the version you just saved in Photoshop. You won't have to re-create anything.

I don't know if there are any new methods in Flash 8 to help with that issue.. You could always use a zoom viewer, if quality is THAT important. Check out this for an example of what i mean : http://www.veer.com/zoom/

[elcandi]

I never herd of the zoom viewer, I am impressed.

From what i can tell I can use smaller pictures (which mean smaller file sizes and a smaller .swf size as well.

Thank you for the info.