Working with Individual Instances and Color Styles in Flash CS3

In the last tutorial, you learned how to create several instances of a symbol by dragging them from the Flash^R Library panel onto the Stage. Our example symbol was an oval and we planned to animate the instances as snowflakes. Because these snowflakes were created as instances of the same symbol, they were identical. In certain cases, you might want all the instances to be identical. However most of the time, you will want each instance to be slightly different from the others. To give our snowflake scene more realism, we will need each snowflake to be slightly different. Once an instance is selected, there are several properties that we can control including position, size, scale, rotation, style, blend and filters. All of these can make each instance appear different from the rest. In this tutorial, we will change some of the Color Styles properties for each of our snowflakes. The Color Styles properties that we will be changing are Brightness, Tint, Alpha and Advanced (Tint-Alpha).

Open the Flake.fla project file that you created in the last tutorial. You will need at least four snowflakes on the stage. Drag more instances of the Flake symbol from the Library panel if necessary.
Single-click on one instance of the snowflakes. The properties for the selected instance will be displayed in the Properties Inspector. Set the Color Styles drop-down menu to Brightness and then use the Slider that appears next to the menu to set the Brightness Amount to 70%.
Select a different snowflake. In the Properties Inspector, you will notice that the settings have changed to display the information for this selected instance. This time set the Color Styles drop-down menu to Alpha and set the Alpha Amount to 50%.
Select a third snowflake. Set the Color Styles drop-down menu to Tint, set the Tint Amount back to 100% and pick a lavender color swatch from the Color Picker.
Select the last snowflake. We will use the Advanced setting from the Color Styles drop-down menu. This is a two-step process. First we will set a Tint color as we did in the previous step. Set the Color Styles drop-down menu to Tint and you will notice that the settings we used previously are still there. Let's change the color swatch to a bright yellow. Now, change the Color Styles drop-down menu to Advanced and click on the Settings button that appears next to the menu. The yellow color is already set in the Advanced Effect dialog box. Set the Alpha to 30% and click OK.
Save your project file as Flake2.fla.

Note– As in most software programs, you can select more than one instance at a time by holding down the Shift key on your keyboard. When you have several instances selected, any change in settings will be reflected in all of the selected instances on the Stage.