Flash CS5: The Missing Manual

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 ...