This was one thing, which we were discussing over the weekend. With the exciting new features which was displayed in the MAX 2004 about 8Ball , it looks like we don’t need to go out of Flash to do basic image manipulations such as blur or shadows and these happen to be the most frequent task for which we guys in the new media industry need a image manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop. I don’t know how many more of such image manipulation functions are included in 8Ball, for me it looks like this will make a real big difference to the image manipulation industry. Lets see what the community thinks about this.
You can participate in the poll on the main page of this site.
For those of you who have not yet got a chance of seeing the video here it is.
Comments
i'm looking at it more like it will be a great compliment to tools liek photoshop. I don't do the graphics work here at the studio usually...the designer usually hands me off a layered ps file and i "flash it out". It's always been a pain if they had used blending modes...now (hopefully) i can just recreate the same thing in flash without having to come up with workarounds.
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at November 29, 2004 07:24 AM
i don't think it will replace photoshop or fireworks. For one you'll still need to add the alpha channel if you want the drop shadow in flash not run along the square edge of the art. Yo'll still need them to adjust resolution, curves, layered effects, etc. Flash is just smoothing out the workflow of the most basic processes.
Runtime pixel-filtering is useful, but doesn't completely overlap with authoring-time pixel-filtering. Late-filtering is great if you want programmatic or animated control over the effect; early-filtering is great to get the filtering out of the way without burdening the client processor.
(Director has had pixel manipulations for years, but Fireworks is still a handy companion.)
One potential side-effect: People who needed a blur or glow on a piece of display type may now be able to use text rather than bitmaps, reducing file transfer size, at cost of an increase in runtime computation.
jd/mm