Change color image to black and white

(you're welcome.)

Thanks very much!

you're welcome.

each pixel in your movieclip will have its color adjusted by the colormatrixfilter. how that color is adjusted depends on the values in the matrix filter.

the first 5 entries (ie, the first line in my sequence of 4 concats) determine the amount of red in the transformed movieclip. the next 5 entries (2nd line) determines the amount of green in the transformed movieclip. the next line the amount of blue and the final line the alpha.

because each of the first 3 lines are the same, the pixels in the transformed movieclip are going to have equal parts R, G and B. ie, they are all going to be gray. the shade of gray of each pixel depends on the amount of R,G,B of the untransformed pixel's movieclip. i used an average (~1/3) of the R,G,B of the untransformed movieclip pixels to determine the shade of gray. other choices will also work and may yield more accurate results, if anyone cares.

you should be able to see if an untransformed pixel is white (full R and full G and full B), the transformed will also be white. if the untransformed pixel is black (0 R, 0G, 0B), the transformed will also be black. and if an untransformed movieclip pixel is solid R or G or B, the transformed pixel will be gray with light-dark about 1/3 from black, 2/3 from white.

Kglad, could you explain the choice of .33 please.

I think that's a little too cryptic for us mortals kglad!

You can use a nice little tween engine called TweenLite (google for it), there are as2 and as3 versions. It makes it simple to tween the saturation to 0.

I'm pretty sure you can do this using the ColorMatrixFilter class if you can get your head round it! Take a look at the example in the language reference which varies the colour saturation. Let us know if you succeed; I'm going to have a try - I'll let you know.