Photoshop Techniques - Animating Layers in Photoshop CS3 Extended
This article is great for beginners who are learning Photoshop. Photoshop is used to edit images and a host of other things. Here in this article, they have shown you how to make videos or animations using Photoshop.
Step by step instruction on how to make frames and then combine them to make a video have been given. Also, an example has been given so that you can make an animation of your own while going through this article. A very helpful and easy article for beginners to learn Photoshop from.
Now from your chapter 6 folder open up coolherbie.pse. This is our good old buddy herbier whom I was kind of missing a little bit. Good to have you back herb. This is him with some cool night lights going on. And make sure if it is not showing already, go to the window menu and select animation. Make sure the animation palette is showing and it is displaying timeline. And if it is not then go to the fly out menu and select convert to timeline.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with video, a lot of this is going to seem very new to you. So let me explain basically what is going on here. Although it is very noisy with a lot of elements going on once you understand what it is doing, it is very intuitive. Now I am just going to start here from the top and read it like a book. Going from left to right and top to bottom. Now over here we have the time. This displays the correct time of this little marker here. This is the time here. Also, called in some applications as the CTI or the current time indicator.
As we click and drag this cursor to the right we go farther out in time. So to the left is the beginning of our animation and to the right represents the end of our animation. Now as we break up this time code from left to right, before the colon here we have hours, minutes, and then frames. Typically, when you are working with digital video, the frame rate is 30 frames per seconds. As a matter of fact we can tell that’s what it is in this instance because it says right here 30 fps. FPS stands for frames per second. Frames are essentially those images that I talked about in the last segment that comprise every piece of video.
So basically what this is saying is that this video plays at a rate of 30 frames per second. That’s very close to a frame rate of a standard television set. Now we are seeing this double sided arrow here. It’s because we can click and drag and change this timeline to whatever we want. So if we want to move it out in time a little bit go further along in our animation, move it to the right and drag it to the left to go earlier into the animation. If that’s the way we want to change it. We also have these red numbers here, which correspond, to our different points in time.
So this maybe misleading because it looks like 5 and then nothing else and then we have an f for frames. What this is really telling us is that we are 5 seconds out and that there are zero frames. And again if you forget where you are always go back to your little current time indicator over here on the left hand side. You always go back to the current time area on the left hand side and it will tell you exactly where your cursor is. If you want to zoom in to your timeline click this button here, the timeline bigger and you could see frame by frame if you wanna do that or you could zoom out to see more of your animation by dragging to the left.
Over here, we have play controls; we will talk about those as we get into animation. Here in the timeline are also listed all of our layers. Each layer comes in as a solid block like this. The cool thing is that if I were to go over here just like normal Photoshop and add a new layer, look at that, it has added a new layer. Now you might be tempted to say, “Well Chad, video doesn’t benefit me anything because I don’t have nay video footage to use, I am not a video guy”! Great news my friend, you don’t have to be. All you have to do is make a new layer of something, anything. And you could turn it into a video layer. So the good news is that you get to play Dr. Frankenstein and bring dead stuff to life.
It’s like these different layers, notice that as we select these different layers, here in the timeline, in our layers panel, they are being updated as well. Very interesting. Also, we have a little arrow here that is pointing to the right. Whenever, you see a little arrow like this pointing to the right, it typically means that it is a twirl which is common speak for basically saying you can click on it and open up additional properties. I am actually going to delete this layer because; we have no need for it. It was just to show you that we could add additional layers here.
So let’s open up Herbie’s properties and you will find that for every layer we could animate three properties- position, opacity and style. You will be glad to know that we will be covering each of these in depth as we go throughout these series. But before we get to any of that, we need to cover the concept of advanced animation. What’s to do with the stopwatch? That’s what we need to talk about right now. Now when the stopwatch is not depressed as you see it now in its default state, it basically means that those properties do not animate.
In other words, they do not change over time. If I were to click this position stopwatch for example, you will see a whole bunch of coming up that we will explain. And it tells Photoshop by depressing that stopwatch, that we want this property to change over time. It is nota stagnant property. This is crucial because if I go in, create tons of great animation, and then try to undo that or something by clicking the stopwatch then we are basically telling Photoshop, you know what; scratch that. I don’t want it to animate over time. I want it to be in the same place always.
And all of the animation data that we have created will be erased. Be very careful of that. I will probably remind you of that a few more times as we go along here. Now in the last segment we looked at frame animation. We talked about creating frames and then having Photoshop those frames to create the in between frames. When we are on the timeline side of the animation palette that is done for us automatically. And its probably best here to describe the process of animation and some of these key terms that you will be seeing and hearing a lot.
Now in traditional animation which terminology essentially derives digital animation, there would be the big bucks animation that we create with what’s called the key frames. Perhaps if there were for example, I don’t want to get in trouble here, if a snowy whitish lady were looking at an apple to eat per chance, the big bucks animator might have her pick up the apple and then a little later down the road, having her hoist the apple in the air to kind of examine it a little bit.
What they would then do is take the animation or those frames that the key frame animator made up and take them to the kind of, the lower-paid interns that have you, that don’t get paid as much and they would make all the frames in between those two shot. That job still to this day is called tweening. Making up the frames in between the big important key frames. Now the good news about the timeline side of the animation palette is that you and I are the big bucks animators.
We just set the key frames and Photoshop unlike the frame side will automatically create the in between frames for us. So, I have clicked the stopwatch here at 2seconds and 9 frames. That tells Photoshop that at 2 seconds and 9 frames into our animation this character better be right there. It locks that position property and ties it to that particular point in time. If we go out farther in time and then move our character, notice that it automatically created one of those diamonds or key frames for us automatically. Now do we have to go in and set up all the tweening?
Nope, Photoshop automatically created that for us. Very smoothly, I might add. Now we are going to talk a little bit more in depth about each one of these including position. But I just want you to be aware right after that how to set key frames and how this tweening process works. Now often times in digital applications like, after effects and here in Photoshop, the tweening word has been replaced by a more fancy word, interpolation.
And so instead of calling it tweening, Photoshop’s guess work of getting from this frame to this frame is called interpolation- what it makes up in between our key frames. So that’s pretty much it for right now, the best is yet to come. Let’s move on.
