Change the color and transparency of an instance, Swap one instance for another, Change an instance’s type – Adobe Flash Professional CC 2014 v.13.0 User Manual
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instances.
1. Select the instance on the Stage.
2. In the Display section of the Properties panel, deselect the Visible property.
Change the color and transparency of an instance
Each instance of a symbol can have its own color effect. To set color and transparency options for instances, use the Property inspector. Settings
in the Property inspector also affect bitmaps placed in symbols.
When you change the color and transparency for an instance in a specific frame, Flash Professional makes the change as soon as it displays that
frame. To make gradual color changes, apply a motion tween. When tweening color, you enter different effect settings in starting and ending
keyframes of an instance, and then tween the settings to make the instance’s colors shift over time.
Note: If you apply a color effect to a movie clip symbol that has multiple frames, Flash Professional applies the effect to every frame in the movie
clip symbol.
1. Select the instance on the Stage, and select Window > Properties.
2. In the Property inspector, select one of the following options from the Style menu in the Color Effect section:
Brightness Adjusts the relative lightness or darkness of the image, measured on a scale from black (–100%) to white (100%). To adjust
brightness, click the triangle and drag the slider or enter a value in the box.
Tint Colors the instance with the same hue. To set the tint percentage from transparent (0%) to completely saturated (100%), use the Tint
slider in the Property inspector. To adjust tint, click the triangle and drag the slider or enter a value in the box. To select a color, enter red,
green, and blue values in the respective boxes, or click the Color control and select a color from the Color Picker.
Alpha Adjusts the transparency of the instance, from transparent (0%) to completely saturated (100%). To adjust the alpha value, click the
triangle and drag the slider or enter a value in the box.
Advanced Separately adjusts the red, green, blue, and transparency values of an instance. This is most useful to create and animate subtle
color effects on objects such as bitmaps. The controls on the left let you reduce the color or transparency values by a specified percentage.
The controls on the right let you reduce or increase the color or transparency values by a constant value.
The current red, green, blue, and alpha values are multiplied by the percentage values, and then added to the constant values in the right
column, producing the new color values. For example, if the current red value is 100, setting the left slider to 50% and the right slider to
100% produces a new red value of 150 ([100 x .5] + 100 = 150).
Note: The Advanced settings in the Effect panel implement the function (a * y+ b)= x where a is the percentage specified in the left set of
boxes, y is the color of the original bitmap, b is the value specified in the right set of boxes, and x is the resulting effect (between 0 and 255
for RGB, and 0 and 100 for alpha transparency).
You can also change the color of an instance using the ActionScript ColorTransform object. For detailed information on the Color object, see
ColorTransform in ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference or ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference.
Swap one instance for another
To display a different instance on the Stage and preserve all the original instance properties, such as color effects or button actions, assign a
different symbol to an instance.
For example, suppose you’re creating a cartoon with a rat symbol for your character, but decide to change the character to a cat. You could
replace the rat symbol with the cat symbol and have the updated character appear in roughly the same location in all your frames.
Assign a different symbol to an instance
1. Select the instance on the Stage, and select Window > Properties.
2. Click the Swap button in the Property inspector.
3. Select a symbol to replace the symbol currently assigned to the instance. To duplicate a selected symbol, click Duplicate Symbol and click
OK.
Duplicating lets you base a new symbol on an existing one in the library and minimizes copying if you’re making several symbols that differ
slightly.
Replace all instances of a symbol
Drag a symbol with the same name as the symbol you are replacing from one Library panel into the Library panel of the FLA file you are editing
and click Replace. If you have folders in the library, the new symbol must be dragged into the same folder as the symbol you are replacing.
Change an instance’s type
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