The best possible image quality in Flash MX
Posted by jerothe in 
Working with Photos in Flash can be a tricky proposition.
I have had problems before when importing photos for use in a Flash presentation. Many times photo quality can seriously decrease disproportionately to the quality level that is set in the publish settings.
Today, I read a post regarding image quality on Macromedia forums saying that “You cannot scale photos in Flashâ€. Having problems with a Flash file that contained photos, I tried out this theory.
I had imported three photos into a flash file, scaled them down approximately 20% and I had set my publish settings to a reasonable 92%. The images looked jagged and all text used in the images was illegible. Even when the publish settings were set to 100% quality, the text still looked jagged.
By resizing this images to the exact size needed in Fireworks and then re-importing them into Flash, all text was legible, and images were crisp. I was even able to reduce my export quality back down to 94% and have the images and text look presentable. Also, surprisingly, I reduced the overall movie size by 200-300K.
This would be my advice to all of you out there.
If working with photos in Flash and you can’t figure out why they look so bad, use the tips above to troubleshoot.
I would always advocate that any and every webpage is first laid out in Fireworks. That way no image adjustments will be made in Flash. All image size decisions will have already been made in the layout.
If there is an instance where layout decisions are being made in Flash and you are scaling an image multiple times to try to make a layout work, when the final size is chosen, the image should then be sized correctly in Fireworks and re-imported into Flash.
