Shamoozal.com - Smorgas Board

okay i think i've tried just about everything and googled myself to death trying to find any kind of help for this question. i think i even asked this question when i was in school and my teacher didn't know. okay so my problem is that i wish to PRINT a painting i made completely in flash. it's impossible to print directly from flash because there are effects and i lowered the alpha on a bunch of layers. there is a way i believe.. with action scripting, that you can print, but i think the quality still isn't great, and i've looked up the action scripting and it looks like a mess, and i'm terrible at it anyway. i've also tried to just take a screen cap of the exported swf and bring it into photoshop and print that way, it's a good remedy for getting a nice looking jpeg for the web, but it looks terrible when printed because the dpi is low. so i ask you, please, there has got to be an easy way of exporting the jpeg at 300 or even 200 without errors happening. usually, flash just exports the upper left corner of the drawing, leaving the rest blank. so any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Hi, I'm weesie.

I can't say I ever tried that before. Off the top of my head, I have two solutions. Try exporting an EPS and opening that in Photoshop. Problem is, you'll likely lose some of your effects. The other more trickier solution would be to zoom into your picture and take multiple screen caps and then paste them all together in Photoshop... but I imagine that would be done in the worst case scenario imaginable.

Step 1)
Don't paint in flash.


Hahahaha

Hahahaha, yeah, that's probably the best step.

umm, well thanks anyway

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Hi, I'm weesie.

im sure you've tried hitting file/export and trying to export a PNG or a TIFF. a tiff is lossless and should maintain any effects you have. beware of any "movie clips" as they may not render out properly so set them temporarily to a "graphic" if thats causing a problem. you can up the resolution in the export image dialog box which also ups the image size of your stage.

i know that flash has a screen export cap at around 3000x3000 pixels. i know a few people who have had trouble on professional jobs exporting images for print from flash. it sounds to me like you are hitting that wall in how you describe flash only exporting a single corner of your stage. like phil suggested, i believe a few of them had to stitch the image back together again in photoshop. not exactly the best way but it did work.

hope that helps!

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Swear to me.

yeah i ended up having to finagle things in photoshop and it turned out decently, i asked the tech guy at work and he didn't have any suggestions either so i guess flash just isn't designed for printing? or exporting half decent image files. thanks for the help

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Hi, I'm weesie.

Since Flash is now part of adobe could you export all the vector material to Illustrator and work from there?

i don't think so, i already tried exporting a .ai and opening it up in illustrator and the layers on which i lowered the alpha show up at 100 percent alpha. lol it was actually kind of creepy looking since the painting is of a person, there were blotches and lines every where.. looked like he had some sort of skin disease.

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Hi, I'm weesie.

Flash : it gives you skin disease on top of ulcers.

yes it really is a pain. GUESS IT'S TIME TO LEARN HOW TO USE PAINTER :O.

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Hi, I'm weesie.

yeah without a doubt, flash is not built for print like illustrator is. good to hear it worked out for you.

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Swear to me.

I think my friend's sketch sums up all of our problems:

haha yeah ive been there before.

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Swear to me.

You can export as an EPS, but like you said, you'd have to do some legwork afterward.

I made a huge mistake in, for god knows what reason, designing a logo of ours in Flash. I guess because it's been so long since I used AI that I'd have an easier time playing around in Flash. But anyway, they liked the logo, so I tried an export to EPS and it looked like balls. So I need to recreate it in AI eventually, which shouldn't be too hard. Just sayin.