Now there is one box in our window that we have not talked about yet. But, I think it is probably one of the most interesting ones and that is the Alpha Setting here. Let me pick out some special area in our graphic that we can play around with. I am going to pick out the cloud and I got the balloon floating in front of the cloud right now but just for display purposes, I am going to put the balloon behind the cloud. Now, right now it is blocking it out and that is because our Alpha Setting is going to control transparency. Now, I find this really interesting because I personally do not know of a single other program that allows you to set transparency as a color setting. It becomes part of the color definition. If I pick up that cloud, I can see my fill colors currently white. So let us change the fill color on that. Obviously, I could change the fill color a little bit like maybe to a gray or something.

But in addition to that, I could drop in some alpha. Now, I am not changing the view on the screen yet but you can see in my panel right below my slider that the preview for this shows a grid appearing. And, the more I go towards a zero alpha which is completely transparent, the more of the grid I can see. You can do this for any color you choose in the program. So let me put about 50% of alpha in here for my white color. Now you can see the preview over here. I am not going to see the effect to that until I click away but I have definitely dropped in a transparent white color into the fill of that cloud. Now, it will be harder to see but I just wanted to make sure that we try this at least once. I am going to zoom in on my leaf there and I just wanted to show I can do the same thing for strokes as well as long as I go in and choose a stroke color, I can choose kind of a medium gray. But, I could also set an alpha in here for the stroke color. When I click away, it does not really show up too well but you could sort of see the alpha down in here.

So we have got that as our new addition to our color selection tools. It is the ability to put transparency on anything that has a color. Now, there is one more thing I want to talk about before we let go of just selecting colors. And, that is there is one additional setting that we can play around with. I think that I will make my cloud opaque again. Anytime you are pulling down one of these menus and selecting colors, you will notice that you get an eyedropper tool. Now, that is worth taking note of because it is different than the eyedropper tool we saw in the palette over here. We have been using it to sample a color straight out from this swatch palette. But, if you roll that off the swatch palette, you realize that the eyedropper tool is actually still active. You can pick up whatever color that you have currently rolled over. I am going to make one quick setting because my alpha is coming in there and you can see that it applied the alpha to whatever color I was running. If I wanted to pick up the sample color, I could pick it up from anywhere on the screen. So I could very easily match my cloud color to another cloud for instance.

This is additionally helpful when we start to look at bitmaps a little later in the lessons because I can use that same exact tool to select the color straight up of a bit map and match my flash graphics to my bitmap graphics that I have imported.