Lately, I was working on a website which should have a neat Flash menu with funny jumping graphics. Now, they should be real bitmaps, not vectors. So when I wanted to let my images jump, whereby they should also change in size a little, I encountered a problem: The images only looked well at a size of 100%. As soon as they were being scaled however, they seemed pixelated and looked very terrible.

Strangely enough, it took me quite long to find the solution on the internet. The greatest suggestions were to be found everywhere, from changing the quality settings of the Flash export through to cryptical ActionScript commands. A typical case of “not seeing the wood for the trees”, for the solution to the problem is much simpler. Nevertheless, since it seems to be so amazingly unknown, I will share my grandiose discovery with other desperate Flash-image-scalers here:

Go into the library of your Flash project and do a right click on the image that is to be scaled. Then you select “Properties” and get the dialog box that is shown on the right. There you check the box which I have skillfully marked with a red circle in a graphical masterstroke: “Allow smoothing”.

That’s it! Now the image can be scaled without ugly square artifacts. For a best possible quality however, it is still advisable to set the JPEG quality of the Flash movie to 100%. That can be done under “File” → “Publish Settings” on the “Flash” tab.