Flash's Integrated Design Environment (IDE) lets you create dynamic effects with Flash's graphic design and color tools without programming. The tools that are used for the creating of dynamic lighting effects are the gradient tool and the masking tools The gradient tool can be used to create color and lighting gradients for 2D and 3D objects. You can select simple gradients such as radial and linear lighting gradients, or you can import gradients from sections of photographs or graphics with Flash's import option. All of the gradients that are created with Adobe tools, such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, can be directly imported into Adobe flash for color and lighting based dynamic effects.
If you have created graphics for your Flash program you can also control changes in the color and lighting of the graphic as an animation or movie plays. This is often done with color and lighting tweens that can be set on the Flash IDE timeline. You can create lighting tweens on objects so that the colors in the gradients changes brightness, tint, hue and saturation levels as the animation progresses.
ActionScript programming offers a level of control beyond what the Flash IDE tools offer. The gradient control commands in ActionScript can be used to control the transition of colors in a graphic object level at the pixel level. Because you can program each pixel for any type of color transition and transitions based on on the color of neighboring pixels, you can create Flash programs specifically to generate mathematically controlled dynamic lighting effects.
You can use either Flash IDE tools or ActionScript code to blend the light in the graphics of your animation with other colors or with the colors of other graphics. The blend mode has several different options for dynamic lighting effects. These include layer, darken, multiply, lighten, screen, overlay, hard light, add, subtract, difference and invert. Applying a blend mode to a graphic in Flash requires that you convert the graphic to a movie clip object. Select the graphic and use the "Convert to Symbol" option in the Modify menu to convert the graphic to a movie clop.