2 Strategies
1. Importing a tradition Stop-motion or cell animation
2. Animating a Photoshop Workflow
Importing a Stop-Motion
1. Basic Stop-Motion, 3 Ways:
--Movement:
--Replacement:
--Manipulation/Deformation:
2. Points to consider when shooting stop-motion
-- Framing the shot
-- Lighting
-- Pacing of changes
3. Importing the photos
File-->Scripts-->Load Files into Stack
Choose your range of files. They will distribute to layers in a single PSD file.
4. Making the Frames
a. Make sure Animation Palette is open (Window-->Animation)
b. From Dropdown menu on animation palette Make Frames from Layers
c. Click through the Frames in the Animation palette. You'll notice that Photoshop creates frames by turning off visibility for all layers but that particular frame.
d. You can select a sequence of frames by holding Shift or Command and selecting several frames in the palette.
e. Select All Frames from the Animation Palette dropdown menu or shift click all the frames. Then choose a different time allotment for each frame from the dropdown menu underneath one of the animation frames. Press the Space Bar to preview the animation.
g. To output your animation, go to File--> Save for Web, and choose Gif format instead of JPEG. Gif compression allows you to shrink the File size by reducing colors. After saving your Gif, you can view the animation in a Web Browser.
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Animating a Photoshop Workflow
The Animation Palette in Photoshop has a very limited set of options. Other programs like Aftereffects, Cinema 4D, or Flash are much more robust applications for creating motion graphics. It can be interesting, however to exploit Photoshop's limited options to create animated Gifs or simple stop-motion sequences.
1. Erase all frames from your sequence except for the first.
2. Create a new frame. The only changes to your Layer that the Animation palette will record are simple layer movements, layer opacity, layer blending modes, and layer styles (like drop shadow,etc.) Any more robust changes like transformations, or drawing with a paintbrush on a layer will change that layer on all frames, a real pain in that ass if you want to animate your changes to a file.
3. Try creating several new frames with the allowable changes.
4. There is also a Tween option that allows for a smooth transition between one position, opacity or layer style and another.
5. The greater range of possibilties --being able to use all of Photoshop's editing tool-- is possible by simply Duplicating the Layer before you make a change, either by going to the dropdown menu in the Lyers palette, or pressing Command-Shift-D . Each time you want to make a change, dupe the layer, and once you have all the layers you want to make the animation, go to the Animation palette and hit "Make Frames from Layers"
WARNING: Once you have animation frames set up, it becomes VERY tricky to add new layers to your PSD file or make any other changes, because often these new changes will be distributed across all the frames in your animation. If you want to make any further changes, delete all your frames, make the changes, and then "Make Frames from Layers" once again.
