Image Smoothing… a must know!
So I decided to start working with graphics a bit more. Nothing too exciting, but I wanted to have the earth rise and start rotating in a little flash ad for my company’s website. I cut out a nice picture of the earth, imported it to the stage and started scripting. I used a simple tween, which I will post about soon, and all was well…. kinda. So the earth rotated fine but it looked kind of jagged and pixelated at some points during the movement. I figured this was just something I would have to live with and moved on. I came across and article in Justin Everret-Church’s blog that talked about image smoothing. Justin is the project manager for Adobe’s Flash player.
Long Story short, I tried it. It makes a huge difference and it is scary to think that I might never have come across that feature. When you import an image to the library (jpg, gif, or png), right click it and select properties. When you do that there will be an option called “Allow Image Smoothing.” I do not know of any drawbacks to this yet but I do know that it makes a huge difference when animating images.