I've got a sequence of .JPG images that I'm trying to turn into an animation, and a guy in my office tossed me a Photoshop CD. But for the life of me, I can't get the stupid thing to do it. Adding a "New Frame" simply adds a duplicate image, and opening multiple photos just gives me multiple Animation toolbars. How do I insert two (or more) separate image files into an animation?? The help files are useless too, b/c they only refer to "multi-layered" images, but then they don't tell you how to combine several photos into a single multi-layered image capable of being animated! Anyway, I've decided to sacrifice my ego by asking you guys how to do this simple task...anybody feel like enlightening me? Surely it's not as difficult as I appear to be making it...

 

Photoshop 6.0 comes with Image Ready 3.0 - you need to use Image Ready to make FRAMES which are far different than LAYERS used in Photoshop. Also, the animation will come out as a GIF89a, not a JPG, FYI.

Hope this helps.

 

Tedow:

Have you got access to Paint Shp Pro 7? It comes with Animation Shop. What I tend to do is from PSP, save each image that I want to use as a separate file, to the desktop. Call each saved image what you like, but for simplicity and continuity, I call them 1,2,3 etc. When you've saved all the images, open Animation Shop and there is an animation 'Wizard' which allows you to select all your saved files for animation. They are then displayed in a continuous strip rather like a piece of film. You then simply have to click on 'View Animation' and away it plays! You can alter various parameters like time between frames etc, and there are a number of clever transition effects available.

Photoshop has been the industry standard package for years, but it's very complicated to get into, very expensive, and in my view seriously threatened for value now, by the likes of PSP and Corel.

Re. Layers. .. basically if you remove say someone's head and paste another one into the image, it's a 'layer'... you can move it around over the top of the underlying image. In fact think of it as floating over the top pf the original image. You can have as many of these layers as you wish stacked up, but when you save them as a jpeg, the image will be flattened i.e. reduced to a single image with all the layers combined into it. Most animation packages require the image to be flattened anyway for the image to be used as an animation.

I hope this helps. Stick with it, it can be loads of fun.
Please PM me if you need help.

If there are any transparent colours in your image you will have to save them as .gif files as Schatten says. If the finished file is for web use it is customary to save as a .gif file which reduces the number of colours in the file and therefore the file size.

 

As far as I know, Schatten is correct. You'll need to make it an animated .gif file which can be done with Image Ready (companion program to Photoshop 5.5 and 6.0). You can also save your individual frames as .gif files and assemble them using an animation program.

I've used Ulead's Gif Animator program with a lot of success: http://www.ulead.com/ga/runme.htm they have a free trial and some very cool and easy to use special effects. Just remember that it uses a "differential" layering technique - that is, it only changes the pixels that it needs to, so the more the image changes from frame to frame, the larger the image is going to be.

 

You can also download free evaluation versions of PSP, Animation Shop and other stuff from the Jasc Products site:-

http://www.jasc.com/download_4.asp?

 

If you've never used Photoshop, I'd suggest getting a decent book like Photoshop in a classroom for starters to cover the basics, then move on to a more advanced book. For me the learning curve is high, and will take a while to be comfortable in Photoshop.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Schatten
[B]Photoshop 6.0 comes with Image Ready 3.0 - you need to use Image Ready to make FRAMES which are far different than LAYERS used in Photoshop.

 

Thanks for the link...I downloaded Animation Shop and used that for a quick test. It worked quite well, but 7 frames made a 3.5 MB .avi file . Would one of the other animation formats work better? I'll probably optimize the images in Photoshop to get their size down, then try Animation Shop...

By the way, I have about 35 frames total, each image in its original form is ~1 MB, and it will be used in PowerPoint presentations so it needs to be condensed a little bit, but not to the level necessary for web applications....

 

Funny, Adobe Premiere is more geared toward making movies from a series of still shots...

Also most of the low-end 3-D programs (e.g. TrueSpace, Animation Master) can apply a series of stills to a flat surface, aim a camera at it, and presto, render to file.

 

Not wanting to teach you to suck eggs Tedow, but there's no point in saving your individual images(frames) any larger than they need to be. If you intend to show your finished animation in Powerpoint at full screen, say 1024 X 768, assuming that resolution is what you are running your destop at, then that is the size to save your images.

a 1024X768 saved as a BMP (no compression) is2.25MB!
" " JPEG is 129KB
" " Gif is 474KB (with quite noticeable loss of image quality. Only 256 image colours)

You could run your desktop at 800X600 and save the images to that size whereby they would obviously be smaller.

Keep on pluggin', it's character building.