transparent background, please help!

[chrisviper15]

Hello, i am making flash cartoons out of pictures (old nintendo sprites) i downloaded off of a site. when i paste them in flash it puts a filled, colored box around the picture, but when i open it in adobe or any other program, the background is transparent. How do i make it so i can paste pictures into flash and have the background be transparent???

Thank you soo much for your help!

-Chris

[Ask The Geezer]

Only png and gif's can have transparency. Even in flash.

You can import the image and break it apart, then remove the background parts, but it's tedious and increases the overall swf file size.

[chrisviper15]

Hmmm. well, the files are jpegs and png's. how do i do that stuff you mentioned?? this is weird
thanks

[Ask The Geezer]

With a jpg, what you want to do is called Trace Bitmap. It's very processor intensive and will lock most computers. Or mine at least. I found a way that works most of the time.

Import the jpg to the library. Create a new Graphics symbol and drag the jpg to the stage of the symbol and position it, cause it's hard to move it later. Now do a Save of the fla, cause after this it may lock you up.

Click the image and go to Modify/Trace Bitmap. A popup opens with 4 boxes. From the top down set them to 5, 1, Pixels and Many corners. When you click OK, let it work, don't even touch the mouse. It takes awhile, but if it hasn't completed within a minute or so, it's probably locked up. You can try again, and many times it will work the second time. Or, raise the numbers a little in the top 2 boxes and try again.

Once it's done, the image as been broken apart into separate pixels, or bunches of pixels of the same color. You can then select them and delete them, or even change their colors, or drag the outline of the color to change it's shape.

[chrisviper15]

Is that the only way you can do it??? i know i have done it before, i just cant remember how. HMMMmmmmmm

[chrisviper15]

Holy Crap! i just got it to work! thanks for your help!

[Ask The Geezer]

Is that neat, or what?

[chrisviper15]

it doesnt change the look much on the little pixelated sprites i did it on, but on a picture of myself and it looks amazing!!