Why do images brought into flash from a psd appear differently when publish

Question

I am creating a flash banner using a layered psd.  The account team is happy with the look of the psd. BUT, when I bring the images into flash and publish the file, the colors look different.  I import them into flash at the highest quality yet they don't look the same.  Any advice?

Answer 1

The answer relates to color spaces (profiles) and color management in Flash.
In the other creative suite applications you work with a color space to define the colors your using—i.e., if you have #ff0000 full red this will be a different color in sRGB (an RGB color space) than Adobe 1998 (a different RGB color space). You need to have a color space (profile) to make sense of the color values.
Flash doesn't honor profiles currently, which means it ignores these profiles. By default in Flash Player 10, and the only option in all players before 10, it gives these color numbers to the operating system without a color space, so the operating system is in charge of making sense of these numbers. In Windows it will assume these numbers are in the sRGB color space, on Mac it will assume that these numbers are in the monitor's color space (on my macbook this is Color LCD, which I believe is the color space for all macbooks by default).
The way to get the colors to look the best in Flash is to make sure that the document is sRGB before you bring it into Flash. In Photoshop you can convert the colors into the sRGB color space, which will change these color values into the sRGB color space, by going to Edit -> Convert to Profile, and find sRGB in the RGB dropdown. Another way to do it if you are saving just a flat image is to use File -> Save For Web & Devices and check the Convert to sRGB checkbox on the right. Now when you bring the image in to Flash and publish it it should look right on Windows, and probably better on Mac.
Flash Player 10 adds a feature where you can say that all the images are in the sRGB color space and it will hand the color values to the operating system as sRGB numbers. This makes it work better on Mac, if the swf file is viewed in an environment that honors profiles (Mac and Windows honor profiles but most browsers still ignore profiles, but that's getting better). You can turn this feature on by putting this code into your Flash file: stage.colorCorrection = ColorCorrection.ON;. Read more on that at this link: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/10/get_better_color_through_fp10.html. I also gave a presentation on color management and blogged about it, which you can read about and watch here: http://blog.elliselkins.com/2009/02/flying-through-color-space-uflash.html.
Feel free to ask me anything. Hope this helps.