How To Animage Pictures

Animation is an extremely detailed topic in which people spend many many years to learning proper animation. However, you can do some simple animations very easily using the industry's standard product, Photoshop. Start by creating a new 250 by 250 pixel image.

Do this by going to File and New. Enter 250 into the height and the width. Make sure pixel is selected.

Click okay and your blank canvas should be ready. You can zoom in if you need to. Let's create a simple bouncing ball animation.

First, make sure the animation window is open. You can do this by going to Window and clicking on Animation. Make sure the animation window is in a frame by frame mode by clicking on the button on the bottom right corner of the window.

Now, we will start the animations. Select the Eclipse tool. Hold down Shift and draw your ball.

You can choose any colour you want. Change the delay to 0.1 second.

Click on the arrow below the frame. Now, we'll duplicate this frame. This makes the next transition of the animation.

You'll see, the previous frame has been duplicated. Now, move the ball into the new position. In this example, raise it just above the original position.

To fill in the gaps in between the two positions, we will use a tween tool which is located next to the duplicate frame button. Tweening is the process of creating spaces to fill the gaps in the animation. We will use the following settings.

Keep Tween With on previous frame. Change frames to add to 5. Select All Layers and leave the other settings untouched.

Click okay. You should see 5 new frames added to your animation window. Notice the ball in each window moves up slightly.

We will now create the next transition which is going to be the ball moving down. Duplicate the last frame moving the ball down. Perform the tween again with the same settings.

Now, go to the timeline view of your animation window by clicking on the Timeline button at the bottom right of the animation window. Click play. The animation should now start.

Now, you've created a basic animation in Photoshop. So, this is just a very basic animation in Photoshop. For really proper animations, you do actually need to engage a professional animator to help you and they would be able to achieve far more than this simple bouncing ball.

|Animation may take years to master but if you're thrilled by animations and would like to try your hand in creating one, Videojug takes you through this brief Photoshop tutorial on how to animage pictures.