Flash CS5 Fundamentals

Picture of Flash CS5 Fundamentals
Quick Facts
  • Delivery Method Online
  • Professional Certificate
  • 24hrs Suggested Study Time
  • 3 Months Access
  • Tutor Support
  • Study On Any Device
  • 1110 Students

Learn how to use Adobe Flash CS5 to create engaging Web sites, Flash movies, animation, and interactive applications.

Take your graphics skills to a whole new level by adding Flash to your designer toolkit! In this course, you'll learn how to create animated, interactive movies in Adobe Flash CS5.

These days, Flash movies are everywhere—including the Internet, films, TV shows and commercials, and computer games. The skills you'll learn in this course will get you started on your way to a lucrative career designing animated graphics and special effects for one of these fun and exciting fields.

During this course, you'll create a full-blown Flash application, complete with animated text and graphics and interactive buttons. You'll start by exploring the Flash workspace, creating text and graphics, and animating objects on the Flash movie stage. Next, you'll look in detail at the anatomy of a Flash movie—how to use the Flash timeline, layers, and frames to control objects and timing on the stage.

While you can create an entire movie in Flash, most often you'll need to import graphics, sounds, and digital videos from other applications. While creating your first Flash movie, you'll learn how to format and embed external digital media and how to make them appear or play at specific times. You'll also learn how to control digital media based on specific events, such as end user mouse clicks.

Because no course on Flash is complete without an introduction to ActionScript, Flash's powerful programming language, you'll create interactive buttons with ActionScript 3.0. You'll also learn to write scripts that control movie flow and scripts that call to and load external videos, Web pages, and other Flash movie files.

As you create your movie, you'll find out how to design and animate 3-D objects, sync sounds with animations, and publish your Flash movies to the Internet. By the end of the course, you'll know how to create and publish Flash movies and applications, and you'll be well on your way to becoming a Flash designer.


Courses are delivered to you through expertly executed lessons, online instruction and interaction with like-minded students. Our courses are designed to deliver all of the benefits of studying in a classroom whilst giving you the flexibility to study at a time and place to suit your needs. You can access your classroom 24/7 from any device with an internet connection.

This course has a 3 month duration. You'll complete comprehensive lessons, quizzes and assignments before submitting your final exam at the end of the course to achieve your certificate. Courses must be completed within the 3 month access period.

<p>Many people think of Adobe Flash as animation software, but it&rsquo;s much more than that. Flash is the industry standard for creating animated, interactive movies and applications. It's also widely used in TV commercials and cinema special effects. In our first lesson, you'll begin by getting acquainted with the Flash interface, or <i>workspace</i>. Then, I&rsquo;ll show you how to create your first animated graphic. Whether you've worked with Flash a bit before or this is your first time opening the program, you'll be well on your way to becoming a Flash designer when you finish this lesson.</p>

Flash comes with everything you need to create complete interactive movies and applications, including a palette of tools for drawing lines and shapes. Today you'll learn how to draw rectangles, circles, and lines to create a framework for a Flash movie. I&rsquo;ll show you how to change line and fill properties, and how to apply special effects such as drop shadows and gradient fills to the objects you draw. You'll also learn how to arrange and distribute objects on the Flash Stage with the tremendously useful Align panel.

Nearly every Flash movie calls for some kind of text&mdash;such as buttons, headlines, captions, and taglines. In this lesson, I&rsquo;ll show you how to use Flash&rsquo;s Text tool to create basic text. Then we'll apply all kinds of formatting options and special effects&mdash;such as colors, drop shadows and bevels&mdash;to make the text more interesting and appealing. The text you create in this lesson will become the buttons, headlines, and captions for our ongoing movie project during the remainder of the course. We&rsquo;ll also take a brief look at Flash CS5&rsquo;s new TLF Text feature, a whole new text formatting engine that greatly expands text formatting options and text display quality. <p>

In Flash and other animation programs, events happen over time. Flash measures time in frames on a grid called a Timeline. Today you'll learn how the Timeline works. We'll use it and Flash&rsquo;s Layers feature to distribute and animate several objects on the Stage. We'll animate our buttons and graphics so that they fade onto the Stage at different intervals in our movie. You'll also see how to use Flash&rsquo;s tweens (automatic animation creation tools) to make objects move frame-by-frame on the Stage. We&rsquo;ll also take a quick look at Movie Clip symbols. By the end of this lesson, you'll understand the basics of animation in Flash.

As your ongoing movie grows in file size and length, you&rsquo;ll find that breaking it into logically organized scenes makes it easier to work with. This time, I&rsquo;ll show you how to create new scenes. Then, we&rsquo;ll look at importing elements from other programs, such as Photoshop and Word. Most of the movies people create in Flash contain objects created in external graphics programs. I&rsquo;ll show you how to create your first TFL Text box, how to embed fonts, and how to figure out what fonts to embed. You'll also learn the basics of bitmap and vector graphics formatting so that using these objects in Flash movies is a lot easier.

Ready. Set. Action! You can make your movies more interesting, entertaining, and informative with sound and digital video. While it&rsquo;s relatively easy to import a media file into Flash, getting the results you want is not so straightforward. In this lesson, I&rsquo;ll tell you what you need to know about sound and digital video file formats. Then, we'll look at how to make sounds play. You'll discover how to create ambient backgrounds for your movies and how to make sounds play on specific events, such as mouse-overs and clicks. You&rsquo;ll also learn how to use different mouse states, creating rollover-like effects that change the button&rsquo;s behavior as users mouse around in your movies.

To produce applications in Flash, you must know how to create interactivity&mdash;or how to tell the movie what to do when a user clicks a button. Today, you'll see how to use ActionScript 3.0, Flash&rsquo;s powerful programming language, to make your buttons work. We'll look at basic programming concepts, and then we'll write some event listener and event handler scripts that make our buttons hot and our movie interactive. When we finish, you&rsquo;ll have created a complete Flash movie with working buttons, button sound effects, and user navigation.

ActionScript 3.0 is the backbone for creating sophisticated Flash movies. In this lesson, we'll look deeper into programming with ActionScript. You'll learn how to create buttons that allow the user to control animation, and we'll create a short movie that lets users view products online in various colors. We&rsquo;ll also take a look at the new Code Snippets panel and learn how to let Flash create basic scripts automatically and how to save your own code snippets you can use any time in any movie. Since we&rsquo;re venturing into more advanced Flash topics, we&rsquo;ll also take a look at creating and manipulating 3-D graphics in Flash. Finally, you'll learn how to create complex animations with Flash&rsquo;s Motion Editor. <p>&nbsp;</p>

If you've watched a few Flash movies, you've probably noticed that many of them have several features in common: progress bars that tell users how long they must wait before the movie starts playing; image galleries for displaying photos and product images; similar sounds and animations. To save you time when you're creating these common elements, Flash comes with several premade components that install these effects for you. You can find thousands of components on the Web, or you can save your own components and use them over and over. Flash also comes with many motion presets that make it easy to create sophisticated animations. Today we'll take a look at using motion presets and creating and saving your own animations for use in multiple movies.

Like most high-end software programs, Flash comes with and supports files from many other applications. In this lesson, we'll look at Adobe Media Encoder. Media Encoder is a nifty little utility that comes with Flash and lets you format video and sound files for Flash movies and other applications, such as YouTube. We'll also explore the tight integration between Photoshop and Flash&mdash;you'll learn how to work more quickly and efficiently by importing your Photoshop files directly into Flash. We'll even touch on creating Flash movies for cell phones with Adobe Device Central, another cool utility included with Flash.

Flash CS5 has a bunch of great tools and features for creating sophisticated graphics effects and complex animations. Today, we'll look at three of them: the Deco tool, the Spray Brush tool, and the Bone tool. The first two tools create graphics special effects in highly useful and professional-looking patterns. The Bone tool is an animation tool that lets you easily create animations that simulate the movement of humans and animals&mdash;things like people walking, animals running, and birds flying. These tools will help you give your movies and animations a polished, professional look.

<p>Why should you do all this work to create interactive movies if you can&rsquo;t share them with the world? In your final lesson, you'll find out how to publish your work to the Internet. You'll learn how Web servers work and how to upload files to make your creations public. You'll also have a chance to integrate your movies into Adobe Dreamweaver files and then use that popular application to upload your movies to a public Web server. When you finish this lesson, you&rsquo;ll have successfully joined the elite ranks of Flash designers. <b></b></p>

William Harrel

William Harrel

As owner and operator of The Write Desktop Publisher for more than 20 years, William Harrel has been involved in designing Web and print media on computers since the early days of desktop publishing. In addition to running his own design firm, he ... Read more

Read William Harrel's Profile

Frequently Asked Questions

Once you've made the payment, we'll send you a confirmation email with a link to start your course. Feel free to get started whenever you're ready!

You'll have 3 months access to your course. In that time you are free to study at your own pace. The course duration is 24 hours.

Online learning is a flexible way to study that fits around your schedule, giving you the freedom to learn at your own pace from anywhere in the world. You'll have 3 months to complete the course and can take the multiple-choice questions and final exam whenever it suits you.

If you need help, you can contact us anytime. You can also join the discussion area where you can interact with other students. The discussion area for each lesson is open for the entire duration of the course.

Of course! We offer a 7-day money back guarantee. As long as you haven't completed the course, you can get a full refund within 7 days of enrolling.

We do not offer extensions or transfers for this self-paced course. However, you will have 3 months to complete the course, and if you need to cancel within the first 10 days of enrolment, we offer a money back guarantee.

The Learning Environment

From the moment that you enrol in the Flash CS5 Fundamentals you will become an integral part of our learning community. You'll find yourself with the freedom to learn at a speed that suits you, on any device, from anywhere in the world. Achieving your career goals no longer has to mean compromising family and work commitments.

Our Values

Learn At Your Own Pace

We believe in personalised learning. That's why we provide all the tools and support you need to succeed at your own pace. With flexible learning, you'll stay motivated and retain more information. Plus, you can balance your studies with work and family commitments to make your dreams a reality.

We Won't Break The Bank

Education should be accessible to anyone who wants to learn. That's why we offer some of the most competitive prices in the industry with payments plans for just $25 per week. Investing in your future is a smart choice and doesn’t have to break the bank.

Industry-Led Courses

There's no better way to learn than from experts with years of experience in your field. That's why each of our 200+ industry-led courses are designed to give you a real-life perspective on your industry. With our expert mentors, you'll learn from people who have a wealth of knowledge and experience, and who are passionate about sharing it with you.

Get The Personal Support You Deserve

At Vibe Learning, we're real people who are dedicated to providing you with personal support every step of the way. Our industry experts are not only professional and knowledgeable but also incredibly passionate about sharing their expertise with you. With their guidance, you'll gain invaluable insights and practical knowledge to help you succeed.

Photoshop CS5 Intermediate Online Course | Vibe Learning
 

Photoshop CS5 Intermediate

Picture of Photoshop CS5 Intermediate
Quick Facts
  • Delivery Method Online
  • Professional Certificate
  • 24hrs Suggested Study Time
  • 3 Months Access
  • Tutor Support
  • Study On Any Device
  • 583 Students

Take your Adobe Photoshop CS5 skills to the next level by mastering layers, layer masks, Smart Objects, and other advanced features that let you re-edit images easily long after you create them.

If you're already using the basic tools in Adobe Photoshop CS5, take your photo-editing skills to a new level!

In this course, you'll become an expert at using layers, layer masks, and other advanced features that let you change images easily long after you create them (and long after the Photoshop ""undo"" command expires).

Non-destructive editing lets you work faster and reuse parts of images over and over. In these lessons, you'll learn how to save every single pixel in your original image so you never have to say, ""I'm sorry—I tossed that information."" In addition, you'll discover how to use Smart Objects so you can crop or resize an image and return it to its original size months afterward. (You'll even learn some clever tricks for warping Smart Objects!)

After that, you'll find out how to add shadows or embossing non-destructively. And if you want to design page layouts you can fill with different images, you'll learn how to create templates you can reuse.

Whether you use Photoshop to edit photos, make scrapbook pages, or design original artwork, this course will give you all the skills you need to let your creativity shine. Once you see what non-destructive editing can do for your projects, you'll never look back!

Courses are delivered to you through expertly executed lessons, online instruction and interaction with like-minded students. Our courses are designed to deliver all of the benefits of studying in a classroom whilst giving you the flexibility to study at a time and place to suit your needs. You can access your classroom 24/7 from any device with an internet connection.

This course has a 3 month duration. You'll complete comprehensive lessons, quizzes and assignments before submitting your final exam at the end of the course to achieve your certificate. Courses must be completed within the 3 month access period.

Layers add a new world of possibilities to using Photoshop. In this lesson, you&rsquo;ll create, view, and hide layers. Why do layers matter? Well, they open so many opportunities for fine-tuning your images. You can edit a layered image nondestructively, so you don&rsquo;t have to start over if you make a mistake or need to change something.

Today we&rsquo;ll focus on the clues Photoshop gives to explain exactly what you&rsquo;re doing to a layer as you&rsquo;re working. You&rsquo;ll create, move, duplicate, lock, unlock, cut, and paste layers. Knowing this information will let you alter images quickly and nondestructively . . . and the lock commands will help you prevent others (and yourself!) from accidentally altering your work.

Take advantage of Smart Objects&mdash;the most awesome and significant innovation in Photoshop since the layers feature was introduced. You can place a RAW-format photo (or JPG or TIF) file inside the Smart Object and re-edit it in Camera RAW anytime you want. You&rsquo;ll discover how to crop and resize photos nondestructively using Smart Objects, and you&rsquo;ll love the way they let you make a protected package out of an image.

Today you&rsquo;ll see how you can make an individual layer in an image larger or smaller, rotate it, and use the amazing Warp command. And you can reverse all these changes anytime you want&mdash;if you make them on a Smart Object layer. You can even use filters nondestructively, so long as you apply them to a Smart Object (gee, those come in handy!). You&rsquo;ll also create a pear that, when cut open, has an orange inside it.

<p>Each time you edit the exposure in an image, you lose image quality. But what if there were a way to edit the exposure as much as you wanted and not hurt the quality? There is! An <i>adjustment layer</i> makes no permanent change to the image, and you can stack up these layers as you wish. You won&rsquo;t ever want to apply a regular Levels command or Adjustment command directly to an image again.</p>

In this lesson, you&rsquo;ll find out about layer masks&mdash;another way that Photoshop lets you have your cake and eat it too. If you bring a picture of little Johnny onto a new background image, and you erase all the stuff that was in the background, what happens if you change your mind? You&rsquo;d better hope you have the original image somewhere, and then you&rsquo;re in for a lot more work. However, if you use a layer mask, you&rsquo;ll keep every pixel that&rsquo;s in the original image and hide the parts of the original that you no longer wish to see.

Did the dog eat Grandmother&rsquo;s portrait? Or did time and water do that damage? No matter. Using layers makes it easier than ever before to restore some of your treasured family heritage. You&rsquo;ll get ample practice with that today, plus links to websites that specialize in image restoration. Again, the theme of this lesson is nondestructive editing&mdash;working in layers so that you can always change your mind about a correction without having to begin again.

What happens if you want to place a person into a swimming pool or the ocean using Photoshop? To make the composite realistic, you need to transition from total opacity above the water line to total transparency below it. You'll learn that skill today as you work with grayscale and gradient masks. You'll also experiment with vignette edges and other edge effects, plus you'll create a Web page header.

One of the most common ways to lose sleep while using Photoshop is to try to add a new background behind a model with wispy, flowing hair. Hair and fur have always been the bane of Photoshop users. CS5 introduces an ingenious new command to make this process easier. That's one of the tricks you'll learn today when we explore some new commands on the Masks panel.

<p>Have you ever wondered how to put images inside type, like those old postcards for various cities? You&rsquo;ll find out today. It&rsquo;s called a <em>clipping mask</em>, and it&rsquo;s a digital version of spreading glitter onto a paper that has a design drawn in glue&mdash;the glitter only sticks to the glue. In this case, the new layers only stick to the base layer in the clipping mask. Making a clipping mask is easy, but it provides one of Photoshop&rsquo;s &ldquo;wow&rdquo; moments.</p>

Photoshop can use the values in an image to correct the image. That sounds scary and mysterious, but it&rsquo;s actually easy to do. Today, you&rsquo;ll create luminosity masks and use them to correct images and to develop false duotone images and wonderfully creative image composites. This lesson should nurture your creativity and yet give you some solid ways to add punch to an image or to create stunning sepia tones.

Do you like the look of double-exposed images? Would you enjoy creating a seamless composite of your vacation images? Then this is your lesson! It&rsquo;s one of my favorites in the course. Up to now, you&rsquo;ve masked images so that you can either see the image in the layer or not, or you&rsquo;ve used a gradient or paint in the mask to get a grayscale transition. Now you&rsquo;ll use photos in the mask to get a hide-and-seek look to layer visibility. You&rsquo;ll also create an image that has a different photo in each color channel. And you&rsquo;ll finish the course with a fun assignment that lets you put together everything you&rsquo;ve learned.

Sherry London

Sherry London

Sherry London is a noted Photoshop and Illustrator expert, an artist, a writer, and a teacher. Her fiber art has been featured in magazines and exhibitions. Her published works include Photoshop CS2 Gone Wild, Photoshop Magic, Photoshop Effects Ma... Read more

Read Sherry London's Profile

Frequently Asked Questions

Once you've made the payment, we'll send you a confirmation email with a link to start your course. Feel free to get started whenever you're ready!

You'll have 3 months access to your course. In that time you are free to study at your own pace. The course duration is 24 hours.

Online learning is a flexible way to study that fits around your schedule, giving you the freedom to learn at your own pace from anywhere in the world. You'll have 3 months to complete the course and can take the multiple-choice questions and final exam whenever it suits you.

If you need help, you can contact us anytime. You can also join the discussion area where you can interact with other students. The discussion area for each lesson is open for the entire duration of the course.

Of course! We offer a 7-day money back guarantee. As long as you haven't completed the course, you can get a full refund within 7 days of enrolling.

We do not offer extensions or transfers for this self-paced course. However, you will have 3 months to complete the course, and if you need to cancel within the first 10 days of enrolment, we offer a money back guarantee.

The Learning Environment

From the moment that you enrol in the Photoshop CS5 Intermediate you will become an integral part of our learning community. You'll find yourself with the freedom to learn at a speed that suits you, on any device, from anywhere in the world. Achieving your career goals no longer has to mean compromising family and work commitments.

Our Values

Learn At Your Own Pace

We believe in personalised learning. That's why we provide all the tools and support you need to succeed at your own pace. With flexible learning, you'll stay motivated and retain more information. Plus, you can balance your studies with work and family commitments to make your dreams a reality.

We Won't Break The Bank

Education should be accessible to anyone who wants to learn. That's why we offer some of the most competitive prices in the industry with payments plans for just $25 per week. Investing in your future is a smart choice and doesn’t have to break the bank.

Industry-Led Courses

There's no better way to learn than from experts with years of experience in your field. That's why each of our 200+ industry-led courses are designed to give you a real-life perspective on your industry. With our expert mentors, you'll learn from people who have a wealth of knowledge and experience, and who are passionate about sharing it with you.

Get The Personal Support You Deserve

At Vibe Learning, we're real people who are dedicated to providing you with personal support every step of the way. Our industry experts are not only professional and knowledgeable but also incredibly passionate about sharing their expertise with you. With their guidance, you'll gain invaluable insights and practical knowledge to help you succeed.