You can use Adobe® Photoshop® and Adobe® Flash® together to create visually compelling web-based applications, animations, or interactive messaging elements. Photoshop lets you create still images and artwork, providing a high degree of creative control. Flash lets you bring those still images together and incorporate them into interactive Internet content.
The Photoshop drawing and selection tools provide you with a greater degree of creative control than the tools found in Flash. If you have to create complex visual images, or retouch photographs for use in interactive presentations, use Photoshop to create your artwork, and then import the finished images into Flash.
Flash can import still images in many formats, but you usually use the native Photoshop PSD format when importing still images from Photoshop into Flash.
When importing a PSD file, Flash can preserve many of the attributes that were applied in Photoshop, and provides options for maintaining the visual fidelity of the image and further modifying the image. When you import a PSD file into Flash, you can choose whether to represent each Photoshop layer as a Flash layer, individual keyframes, or a single, flattened image. You can also encapsulate the PSD file as a movie clip.
You can exchange QuickTime video files between Photoshop and Flash. For example, you can render a QuickTime movie directly from Photoshop, and then import it into Flash, converting it into an FLV (Flash Video) file, which can be played in Flash® Player.
When you use Photoshop to modify video footage, you can paint nondestructively on its frames. When you save a Photoshop file with a video layer, you are saving the edits that you made to the video layer, not edits to the footage itself.
You can also export Flash documents as QuickTime video, and import them into Photoshop where you can paint nondestructively on the video frames. For example, you can create an animated sequence in Flash, export the Flash document as a QuickTime video, and then import the video into Photoshop.
Flash works internally with colors in the RGB or HSB (hue, saturation, brightness) color space. Although Flash can convert CMYK images to RGB, you should create Photoshop artwork in RGB. Before you import CMYK artwork from Photoshop into Flash, convert the image to RGB in Photoshop.