Photoshop Animating

 PHOTOSHOP ANIMATING 

Animation has always fascinated me having been a huge fan of animated films and programmes. The thought of being involved in animation has always been something pretty cool but always thought I'd have to have some sort of specialist animating software to do the job. It turns out that Photoshop has the ability to create simple animations using its process of multiple layers which act as the frames. The main tools are the timeline window and the tween tool which is the translation of one frame to the next, similar to the animation effects used on powerpoint slides. Here's a snapshot of how this looks in Photoshop;

You can see all the frames below and each of them act like separate documents. So when you click on on frame, you can alter the layers in that frame so that the previous frame transforms into the one you've just altered.

To save as a GIF, which basically allows the animation to be uploaded to the web, the file needs to be saved to the 'Save For Web' tool. A bunch of options appear which can be altered depending how you want to specifically save the file and its quality etc.

My animation is unfinished and a bit rough since it's my first attempt but the next step would be to improve and add in a few cool tricks.