Pixel Fun

Jun 26, 2006

Being a developer whose primary focus is business and data intensive applications means I do not get as much time as I would sometimes like to play around with some of the more 'designish' aspects of Flash development. Case in point, the BitmapData class that was introduced in Actionscript 2.0. I had seen the help documentation and came across some really neat examples of what you can do with bitmaps in Flash, but had never really had a chance to try it out on my own. Well the wait is finally over.

Sampling

What it does: reads the all the pixel colour values in 10x10 squares, calculates the dominate colour value and sets the square to that colour.

Stretching

What it does: draws an image line by line from right to left, using the rightmost pixel as the colour for each line being drawn

Scratching

What it does: covers an image with a coloured layer, allows the top layer to be gradually 'scratched' off to reveal the image layer.

Conclusion

The BitmapData class and it's related classes provide developers with some really great tools for manipulating images and applying effects that would have been impossible or extremely difficult in previous versions of Flash. It just takes a little time and some creative juices to come up with some really neat concepts.