CS4 – one more thing
With every update to Flash I’ve felt a great urge to blog about one missing feature. But I’ve always withheld my outcries because I thought it was such a no-brainer that Adobe would just have to include it in the next minor update. With CS3 I thought they just didn’t have the time to implement it, but certainly a minor update would implement it. Now with CS4 the feature is still missing, and I just have to accept the fact that it’s not coming if nobody requests it.
What am I talking about? Copy-pasting from Photoshop!
There must be millions of Flash developers and designer wondering why one can’t correctly copy-paste a selection from Photoshop to Flash. You’ll get pixels, but no transparency (it’s totally opaque), rendering it almost completely useless.
My work-flow probably is quite different from everybody else’s, but I can’t imagine a single developer or designer not been confronted with the problem of getting a single piece of graphic from a Photoshop document to Flash really quickly. Sure, you can copy-paste the selection to a new document, remove the documents background, crop it, save it as a PNG and then import it into Flash, but that’s way too cumbersome. We’ve even implemented an action in Photoshop which will do much of the work for you, but it’s still not as easy and quick as copy-pasting.
So please Flash/Photoshop teams, get your act together and implement this trivial but important feature.
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I don’t have the full scoop, but I’ve seen a number of big internal conversations on the subject. What actually happens with a copy/paste is that there are multiple representations on the clipboard, and the receiving application chooses the correct one. If I’m recalling correctly, this multiple-representation stage is where the bottleneck is. I’ll see if I can better detail face-to-face this week.
jd/adobe
Thanks JD, your comments and help are greatly appreciated!
It seems that most applications are having a tough time pasting from Photoshop (actually, I haven’t found any app that does it correctly, not even any of the other CS4 apps), so maybe it does require some changes to Photoshop as well.
Dude – you’re dead right!
My thoughts are absolutely identical. I was very surprised that it never made its way into CS3, and absolutely speechless that it didn’t make it into CS4…
Well… i use Fireworks, Photoshop came to me very late
and when i make a design, i just drag it to the Flash IDE and it’s automatically imported as a Movie Clip with transparency and everything.