Subtitles of the Movie

In the previous movie, I demonstrated how to create and modify gradients using the color mixer panel. You can also use the gradient transform tool over here in the tools panel to modify your gradients. This tool is hidden underneath the free transform tool. Click and hold down your mouse till you see the popup menu, then choose gradient transform tool there. Select the gradient, notice that there's a different interface for radial gradients and linear gradients. Here's the interface for the radial gradient. If I go to the color mixer and change that to linear notice that it looks a little bit different. Let me review the various interface points starting off with the radial gradients. First you have your center point here, you can adjust where the center of the gradient will be, the center of the gradient being this bar there that you see in the color mixer. You also have the width handle for modifying the width of the gradient. The rotation handle, you can rotate these gradients to get some interesting effects. You also have the radius handle which is here. Let's go ahead and rotate this back to where it was. The radius handle is this one here, notice that I'm changing the radius of that. This is a little bit different than the width. Also got the focal point handle, which is the triangle right there. Just different than the center point. Again this just takes some practice and some experimentation to really get the hang of this. But you can see that with these various tools, center point, width handle, focal point, radius handle and rotation handle you can really get some customized interesting gradients as well as using the color mixer here to add more color points there. Let me now move over to a linear gradient, this one has fewer interface points here. You have your center point as I had before, you've got a rotation handle and you have a width handle. And those are the only three properties that you can modify with the gradient transform tool here for linear gradients, but you still have all of the settings that you can use in conjunction with the color mixer to modify the actual colors and the banding, the separation of the banding of the colors, as well as removing and adding additional color points. That will conclude this demonstration on how to create and modify gradients in Flash CS3 using the color mixer and also the gradient transform tool here in the tools panel. By now you should feel pretty comfortable working with the various drawing tools in Flash and modifying the graphics that you create with them. If you don't feel like you're quite there yet, you'll want to practice and play around some more with different tools and color settings and techniques that I've covered in the last two sections of this tutorial. You might try drawing some artwork for a project that you want to create in Flash. Nothing will ever replace good old fashion practice, so I recommend that you do so. There are a few additional techniques you need to learn about regarding modifying your Flash images, including blending modes and filters. But both of these require knowledge of a more advanced topic that I cover later in the tutorial, movie clip symbols. So these two graphic modifying topics will have to wait until after I've introduced symbols and movie clips a little bit later. For now let me move onto the next section of the tutorial and cover how to use non-Flash graphics in your projects including how to import bitmap graphics, converting bitmaps to vector graphics, editing and animating bitmaps and much, much more.