for (j=0; j!=bmpData.height; j++) {
for (i=0; i!=bmpData.width; i++) {
blueArray[(pxl = bmpData.getPixel32(i,j) ) & 0xFF]++;
greenArray[(pxl >>=8 ) & 0xFF]++;
redArray[(pxl >>=8 ) & 0xFF]++;
}
}

I know there is still a lot of work left in flash player 10 so I hope this is just something that is gonna be fixed down the road.

well nicely challenging question, two solutions comes to my mind:

1) How to keep it simple, just scale the image to size of one pixel and read that value. ok, might give wrong result in cases such as black and white line art …
as code something like:

var bmp2:BitmapData = new BitmapData(1,1,false,0×00);

bmp2.draw(bmpData,new Matrix(1/bmp.width,0,0,1/bmp.height) );

return bmp2.getPixel(0,0);

2) take some samples from the bitmap, and count, with something like bucketsort, the values with most occurances, simplified by taking only some tree or four most significant bytes from each channel:

something like:

function sampleColor(bmpData:BitmapData):uint {
var buckets:Object = {};
var pxl:uint;

for (var y:int =0; y<bmpData.height; y +=2 ) {
for (var x:int =0; x<bmpData.width; x +=2) {
pxl = bmpData.getPixel(x,y) & 0xE0E0E0;
buckets[pxl]= (buckets[pxl] == null) ? 1 : buckets[pxl]+1 ;
}
}

var maxsample:uint =0;
var maxvalue:uint =0;
for ( var s in buckets) {
if (buckets[s]>maxvalue) {
maxsample=s;
maxvalue=buckets[s];
}
}

return maxsample;
}

Funnily these two approaches return in some cases quite different results ?
… never had done this before so I did do some experimenting. Above 1×1 pixel sample, below sorted sample.

Hope this will help …

nice tutorial. just a question – how can i get the most dominant color (rgb value) in an image?

thanks.