How do i make psd files transparent?

Question

How do i make psd images transparent when I drag and drop the layer onto the stage on flash cs6?
For  example the way iv been doing it up until now was saving as a psd then  going to file import to library on flash. This is very very time  consuming and would be much easyer if i can just drag and drop the  photoshop layer onto the stage, but the problem is that the image gets a  white box around it and isn't transparent when i do that.
Is there an option in photoshop or flash to fix this and make the background trasnparent?

Answer 1

Reminds me of Yoshi from Mario Bros
I know what you'd like to do but as the first reply mentioned, you can't do that. Until Photoshop is updated to copy with transparency intact to the Windows clipboard, you won't be able to do that. The reason I linked and showed a screenshot of the software GIMP is to prove that it's a Photoshop limitation, not a limitation of Flash or the Windows clipboard.
Knowing that fact, there is no way for you to copy/paste drag/drop from Photoshop directly into Flash.
Cartoon animating is essentially identical to how most games work. You create one large master image that contains all the possible variations of your subject (a face, a car, etc) and import that into a game. You do the same when animating, only you're keeping them all separate instead of one image.
Knowing your experience with Flash is small and growing, I'm not going to make the most optimal recommendation. I'll stick to 2 things I mentioned before but elaborate on them.
1) Save your assets to actual PNGs with transparency, then import into Flash.
The reason I'd recommend this the most is because of Flash's update function (which I will explain) and it can be automated a bit (also will be explained).
So I grabbed a Yoshi sprite sheet and say I made a new pose as you mentioned. In Photoshop I'd then select and copy this new pose alone, with transparency:
As you know, once you do that you can bring up a 'New Image' dialog and it will already have the size of your copied pixels (with trimmed transparency):
You can see the size is correct and the preset is clipboard. After that you just paste your new image in and turn off the background to gain transparency. Then you save it out as a separate file. I always use Save For Web for a pinch of file size optimization and overall control:
Again, I realize this is a lot more than you want to do, but all of this can be automated which will be explained after making it virtually a single button push operation.
Now we have the image as a separate new PNG image with transparency intact. This image should be imported into Flash's library:
Now you both have a physical separate copy of this pose in a PNG file (which can be useful for many reasons) and Flash can use that file with it's built in update command for very quick changes.
Now say you touch up a pose a bit. I'll make it really obvious and change the entire hue. You make your changes in Photoshop, follow the same process (even making size changes to the original image), eventually overwriting the PNG you created for that pose:
Now in Flash, all you need to do is use the Update function. Right-click on the image in your library, select Update. Because this is a file with a physical location, that is all that is needed to change the image in Flash:
The power in this is if you make sweeping changes to dozens or hundreds of PNGs, you can do this in one command in Flash. Select all the changed images and hit Update and all your changes will be done at once. You can't do things like this when you copy and paste directly into Flash.
That said, almost all of the steps above can be automated using Photoshops Actions panel. No need to reinvent the wheel, Actions are fully explained here:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-7448a.h tml
I would recommend recording the action after you make your marquee selection around what you want to save as a PNG. Record right up to Save For Web and stop there. Then in the future you press the hotkey you assign and it will extract your selection, open a new document, paste it in, disable the background for transparency and bring you to the dialog you can name the image in. That's pretty easy and automated. Then just import into Flash and enjoy the benefits.
2) Use Photoshop to create the assets, then a different program to copy/paste into Flash
Not ideal to need 2 programs, however if you really want to copy and paste directly into Flash, this is the way to go. Get any program that can read the PSD file format, open your PSD in it. If you have enough RAM this really shouldn't be an issue (PS and GIMP side by side, same file open):
As you make changes to the PSD, just hit reload or revert in your "copy with transparency" supporting program, copy what you need, paste into Flash:
I'll explain some of the advantages of the previous workflow if you'd like but I think this is enough information overload for now.