Easy Brightness Adjustment with Color Panel’s HSB Mode
For things like highlights and shadows, I often find that I need a slightly lighter or darker version of my current color in Flash. Until I knew about the Color panel’s HSB mode, I would either use the right-hand slider, even though it actually changes both brightness and saturation, or multitask over to Photoshop. Sometimes I would just guess.
Figure 1 Color panel brightness/saturation combo slider
As it turns out, the Color panel’s context menu gives you precise, distinct sliders for hue, saturation, and brightness. You simply have to toggle it them on. (This may only refer to the Windows edition of Flash.)
Figure 2 Color panel RGB vs HSB mode
Head to the panel’s upper-right corner and open the context menu. You’ll see your choices right there, RGB and HSB. In RGB mode (the default), the sliders on the left side of the Color panel adjust the amounts of red, green, and blue in the current color. In HSB mode, you can “gray out” a particular hue without affecting its brightness by adjusting the saturation slider. You can change the brightness without affecting saturation or hue with the brightness slider. Obviously, you can also change the hue discretely by sliding its own slider.
For sure, this is just “one of those little things,” but it’s a nice thing to know, because depending on the circumstances, HSB feels more intuitive than RGB as a color picker.