Photoshop Workflows - Frame Animation

1. Introduction Frame animation: Fix Welcome to the most hands on photoshop course you've ever seen. This isn't your typical feature tour. We are diving straight into exciting creative projects, and you are encouraged to create completely unique designs. Have you ever wondered how they create this type of animation, where it seems like someone is scribbling over a video. Most of these animations are created frame by frame, meaning the artist is drawing over each frame one at a time. As you can imagine, it is a time consuming process, especially if the scribble animations are used throughout a longer video. Out of all the Adobe Creative Cloud applications. You probably would guess this type of workflow is best suited for after effects, premiere pro or animate. But the truth is that photoshop is probably the most convenient and effective one thanks to its video timeline panel and its wide range of brushes and layer styles. In this project, we will cover everything you need to be able to create pools, cripple animations over videos, and you will be able to use this technique on any of your own videos. Whether you are an aspiring graphic designer, photographer, marketer, or simply an individual with a passion for visual storytelling, mastering photoshop provides you with the tools to bring your visions to life. This course is perfect for you if you are new to photoshop or if you are stelle taut and aiming to get more confident and effective using it. I am Martin Pinec a certified Adobe expert and instructor, with a design background spanning over two decades. Throughout my career, I collaborated with renowned clients such as Disney, Mattel, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and BBC. Learn to use Photoshops latest features together with the fundamental building blocks, like layers, adjustments, selections, transformations, masking, smart objcks brushes, and so much more. You can also future proof your skills by mastering Photoshops amazing generative AI features. I am not just teaching photoshop. I am empowering you to express yourself, tell your story, and create designs that resonate with your unique style. This is your chance to create work that is truly personal and worthy of your professional creative portfolio. You can follow along with each project and replicate my designs, or you can use the workflows and techniques I show you and create something completely different and unique. So are you ready to revolutionize the way you learn photoshop? Your creative adventure with photoshops starts right here. 2. How to use the Timeline panel: So here we are in photoshop. And for this workflow, you will have to use the desktop version of Photoshop, because currently, this is the only way to access the timeline panel. And this will be crucial because this is where we will be able to create our frame by frame animation. So when you have your timeline panel open, it by default will appear here at the bottom, but of course, you can move this around. You can make it floating as well or dock it back right there, make it bigger or smaller, depending on how many layers are you planning to animate. You might need a little bit more space here. You can also use this slider at the bottom to zoom in and out to see more of your timeline. The most important thing is that you will need to start with a video file. And not all video files are supported in photoshop, but the most common ones, of course, will work like MOV or MP four. Now before we get started, let's just see what we will be creating. Of course, we won't be doing all the animation here. I'm going to show you one of these arrows, how I animated it, and then This is more just an inspiration for you to see what's possible with these techniques. So I'm going to stop the video playing. I'm just going to scroll back and forth and show you that we are going to work on this white arrow here that you can see coming from under the skateboard, turning around and then disappearing again. So reversing back. Once again, let's see the way it appears, spiraling around, following the motion of the skateboard and then disappears. So that's the one we will be concentrating on. But at the end of this project, we will also look at all the animation that I've done here and the little tricks that I used along the way to create things like this glowing effect here, and also how I managed to change the color of the paint here from yellow. To red, so how I managed to create that nice transition there. These are very easy to do in photoshop, but a little bit more time consuming is to actually draw things frame by frame. But even that doesn't take long, especially once you get the hang of this method. And also, if you're using a stylus instead of a mouse, that can speed things up. So right now, I'm currently using vacum into a small tablet, and that makes it easier to draw faster. So, for instance, here, I'm just showing you this is how I would draw with mouse. While with the styles, if I put more pressure on the tablet, I can change the intensity of the lines or the thickness of them. But don't worry, in case you don't have a pen tablet, you can follow this tutorial just as easily with a mouse. So to get started, we will need to open that video file that we have prepared for this project. So go to File Open, and then find the file called skateboard footage dot MOV from the Exercise files folder. Once it opens, it creates a new document with a special video layer inside it. We can see that thumbnail is telling us that this is not a regular layer. A, since we already have the timeline panel open, I can scrub through the video and I can find that footage that we imported. Whenever the timeline panel is open, you can just press space on the keyboard to play the video, press space again to pose it, or you can just grab this blue playhead and go back and forth within the timeline. Now, it's time to fix our layers. First of all, we have to remove this video group that we have here. It's a very simple step. Just go to the layer menu and choose group layers or use the keyboard shortcut command Shift G or Control Shift G on PC. This is going to make sure that the new layer that we will create is not going to end up in the same group. This is important. Otherwise, the technique I'm going to show you is not going to work. So next, we have to go to the layer menu again. But this time, go to the video layers and choose new blank video layer. So once you do that, you will get an additional layer. And depending where the playhead was, it will create this new layer also here in the timeline. Now, you can drag this all the way back just to align it with the other layer. And because it's a blank layer, it doesn't actually have anything inside it. But this is the one that we will be drawing on. So I'm going to rename this layer, and I'll just type in scribble or arrow or whatever you prefer to call it. And we can rename the original layer as well. We can call it footage or video, or again, whatever you prefer. Now, to be able to see what we are doing, I recommend to click on this arrow as well for the scribble layer that we just created. This way we will be able to see all the frames that we will be drawing on. So now that we have everything ready, it's time to select the brush tool. Which you can find in the toolbar or press B on the keyboard. And then make sure that you have the white color selected for drawing. That's the easiest one to be able to see on this footage. So just press D f default colors and then X to flip them around. Or you can use these two icons. So that's the black and white default colors, and then to reverse them to get white on top. So that becomes our foreground color. With the brush tool, you also want to make sure that you are using the general brushes, and the hard brush, in this case, is going to work for us perfectly. And the size of the brush can be adjusted easily. You can go in the brush settings and adjust it there, or you can use the square brackets on the keyboard and make it small enough to be able to draw the line. So that's still very thick. I'm going to make it smaller. Something like that will work. Let's just draw again. Yeah. I think that's going to work quite nicely. By the way, if you hold down command and option keys together, you can also click and drag with the keyboard left and right, and that's also a fast way of adjusting the brush size. Now, I'm going to go back a little bit in time. I want this line to appear somewhere around here, and I'm going to start drawing. First, I'm just going to draw a very small arrow just appearing here under the skateboard. Notice that I chose intentionally a point, which is roughly halfway between the two wheels, so the front and the back wheels, literally in the middle of the skateboard, because that's going to be an easy reference point that we can follow along the way. Now, to move to the next frame, we could use the playhead and just drag it there or use the command from the panel menu, which is this drop down here on the right. Go to next frame. Since this is a command, we will be using a lot. It's worth setting up a keyboard shortcut for it. I used Command asterisk or Star and command forward slash for previous frame. To create a custom keyboard shortcut, just go to the edit menu and choose keyboard shortcuts. Make sure you choose shortcuts for panel menu. Then search for the panel that you are using. In this case, it's the timeline for video. And within that, you will find the two commands. So next frame and previous frame. So once you select these, you just have to press whichever keyboard shortcut you prefer to use. And once you set them up, you can make sure that you accept these changes and click Okay. Now, if this is the first keyboard shortcut you're saving, you might need to actually save it as a new set as well. You just give that a name, and that will be stored on your computer. So just to test this out, I'm going to use the shortcut, going forward, frame by frame, and going back again frame by frame. 3. Creating the first animated detail: So now I can see that there's the first frame that we drew. I can move to the next frame, and I can continue drawing. So again, in the middle of the skateboard, I'm coming out. Let me just go back one step and continue drawing it like that. So I'm going back and forth, and it is looking good. Let's go to the next frame. Again, I'm trying to stay in the middle and keep drawing the arrow. Like that. Again, I'm going back. That is looking good. Now, even though we know that we are supposed to draw this arrow or line from the center of the skateboard. It's still a little bit tricky to tell whether we are aligned to the previous frame or not or how long the arrow was in the previous frame. So to make our life easier, there is actually a very useful feature called onion skin, which you can again find from the timeline panel menu. You just have to make sure you enable onion skins. Once you click on that, it's going to show us the previous frames, but there are also settings for this, which you can find again in the panel menu and choose onion skin settings. Now, these are the default settings, but you can change them, of course. You can adjust, for instance, the bland mode, you can set it to normal or screen and it really depends on the type of footage that you're working with. Sometimes one or the other works better. In this case, I am going to stick with the multiply because I feel like that helps me to see the current frame and the previous frame. It, by the way, shows one frame from before and one frame after the current frame. That's how it works. So if I click okay and I just go back one frame. Now we can see the current frame is this one, which is a little bit brighter than the other ones. And then we can see the previous frame where that small arrow is first appearing and the next frame, which is right after it. So this way, when I move back and forth, I can see how we are switching between these frames. And now when I jump to this frame, it's much easier to be able to draw the next frame because I can just jump there, and I can see exactly what we had in the previous frame. So that's the advantage of onion skin. So I'm going to draw again from the center of the skateboard and just make the arrow a little bit longer, then move to the next frame again and keep drawing and trying to keep extending the arrow Again, because the skateboard is moving, the arrow itself has to move towards the left, and that is why it is useful to have a starting point that we can easily track. So that's roughly in the center. Our arrow is starting to reach the other side now. And at this point, I feel like it's long enough for me not to have the starting point anymore in the middle, so it can start from somewhere around there because the arrow is almost reaching the other side. Let me just use the eraser to remove this last detail here. I wasn't happy with that part. So I'm going to redraw the arrow, at least that bit there. And then we can go to the next frame once again. The arrow can start turning back. One more frame. Here I'm going to start drawing it from the other side because the arrow is disappearing. So like that. Next frame is going to be even. Next frame. Even s and the line is almost completely disappearing now. And maybe just a little bit there still at the end, something like that. Okay. Now, let's see, by going back. I'm just using the keyboard shortcuts. The movement feels quite smooth, looking at it like this. But now I'm going to turn off the onion skin to be able to see this in action. So there's the option. We just turn this off. And then let's take a look. I'm going to press space bar on the keyboard. And there it is. Let's go back. Again, play it. Looks quite nice. I think we've done a good job. It's very fast and it disappears quickly, but it does the job. So we can scrub back and forth without the onion skin, of course, it's always easier to judge what we've done. And the great thing is that we can always go back and refine the animation. So one thing that I feel like can be improved. Is how the arrow appears. So we can use the eraser tool and just delete back a little bit at the start point for each frame to make it feel a little bit more aligned to the skateboard. As if it's coming from behind it. So if we keep that edge more straight, that just helps to create that illusion of depth. Some frames, I've done a good job. So here again, when it starts to disappear, maybe we can make it a little bit sharper, so it feels like it's going behind it, disappearing. Again, here, instead of going over it, we want to make it feel like it is disappearing behind one more time. And then now let's test it again. Go back. It's a very subtle thing, and when we are playing it fast, it might not even occur to us that we made any difference. But believe me, paying attention to these small things really adds up, and the more animation you add, it actually becomes very important to pay attention to details like this. So that looks great, and I'm happy with how this looks. 4. Animating Layer Styles: Now, I am going to show you a couple of additional techniques, which is actually very simple. So once you have the animation itself, you can start playing around with it. First of all, I am going to go to the Layer panel and double click on the scribble layer. So when you do a double click, it opens up the Layer Style panel. And first, let's try out something simple like outer glow. If you click on that, you get the settings here on the right, which might be different for you, but I'm going to click on reset to default, which is going to be a white glow. Set to 35%. But if we increase the intensity of that, you can see how it changes. I'm going to probably set it to around 50%, and I will also increase the size and maybe even the spread. So that adds a really strong cul around the arrow. So let's see the animation with this. I almost turned it into a light source like a neon light. Similar to what we've seen in the examples at the beginning of this project. So I'm going to go back and plate as well in real time. Even then, we can see that fact it's looking quite cool. But then there's a lot of other things we can do. So, for instance, we can go in here and add a color overlay. So that's another effect we can apply. And I'm going to change the color. Maybe choose yellow, which will stand out quite well from the background. Click ok. And by the way, you can always turn off the globe effect in this case, because I just want to focus on the color. I'm going to have that selected. Again, we can play the whole thing. So the great thing is that we don't have to go back and change the color of each of the frames. This applies globally on all the frames. Since this is a single video layer, the layer style we apply will apply to all of the frames inside it. But here comes the interesting bit within the timeline panel, notice that we can animate additional things like position, opacity, and style. For us, there is an opportunity to animate the style, which is the layer style. So if I click on that stopwatch, it will create a key frame in the timeline panel. Now, I can move this key frame around, I can reposition it to the end of the animation. And then I can come back to the beginning somewhere around here. And if I go back to the color overlay effect by double clicking on it and change the color maybe to red, What will happen is that it's going to automatically transition from red to yellow throughout this animation. So if I play this, you can see how the color changes. Now I can go back to that key frame that we created. Go back again, and if I change my mind, I want to maybe change from purple. I can start with purple, and again, it will end up being yellow. And the cool thing is that you can even move these key frames around, I can swap them around, so I can change their order. If I want to start with yellow and then turn purple, that's also an option, simply just by adjusting the order of these key frames. So that's how quickly and easily we could do that. Now, when you are ready with one detail, like, in this case, I feel like this arrow is looking good, We can go to the layer menu and create a new blank video layer where we can continue adding another detail. It's always better to keep these separate instead of doing everything on the same layer. It just gets harder to move things around later if you want to. So this one we haven't named yet, so I'm just going to call it X that appears here in the timeline panel as well. Let's open it just so we can see the key frames, and I'm going to draw it maybe somewhere around here. So I'm using the brush tool again on this new layer, and I am going to actually zoom a little bit closer. That's command or Control plus. And to zoom back, we can use the command zero. But for now, I'm just using the space bar to position the document window, and I will start with just a single dot, then move to the next frame with a custom keyboard shortcut. And I will actually turn on the onion skin as well just so I can see where that dot was. And this time, I don't want this to move too much, so I'm going to draw over it and keep drawing over it. And you will see what I'm drawing here is just a simple x, which gets larger, and also it rotates around while it's appearing. So this is going to be just a little additional detail that we have in our animation. It's very easy and quick to draw. Rotating ad, getting longer, and then we probably can reach a point where it's big enough and we can start making it smaller again. It keeps rotating, but getting smaller now, like that. Getting even smaller Even smaller until it disappears. It's a bit too long. Yeah, like that. Maybe one more frame where it's a dot, and then it's going to disappear, so let's take a look. Okay? It's always going to be easier to see what we've done without the onion skin. So if you turn that off, that's how it looks close up. But let's out, command or control zero to fit the document window to the currently available space. And then using the space bar on the keyboard, I can play it or I can use the playhead scrub back and forth. It looks really good. The cool thing is that in case you want to position this somewhere else, you can just use the move tool and drag it around. And that is going to drag the whole animation to that point. So within the frame, it's going to appear further down. We can also position it anywhere we want over there. And if we want it to appear earlier or later, within the animation, we can do that by dragging the whole layer to the left or to the right within the timeline panel. So if I want to align it to the other animation, so it appears at the same time. I can do just that, and I can see now it appears at the same time. And it's exactly the same length as well, so they disappear at the same time. And what's even cooler is that you can even duplicate video layers. So you just go to the layers panel, right, click on the layer. You want to create a duplicate of, choose duplicate layer or press command or control J, and there's the duplicate layer. We can align it And now we have two of these. We can use the move tool, drag it up, and now we can see two of them appearing. We can maybe move it further back a bit. So now it's delayed a little bit. So one appears and then the other one. We can even have it set somewhere down here. And then play it again, one up there, another one down there. And of course, you can also introduce layer styles on these if you wanted to. But just so we can see, once again, the final animation that I created for this project has quite a lot of things going on. There are some text as well, which is andron. I intentionally did it, so it will look like scribbles, and they're wiggling around. We have another big arrow here with a pattern overlay on And if you are interested to take a closer look at this file, the skateboard animation PSD file is there in the exercise files folder, so you can take a closer look and really analyze everything that I've done here. So I really hope you will find this project exciting and that you will have fun practicing everything that we've learned. If you create something exciting, make sure to share it on social media and tag us so we can also see it and like it. 5. How to export your animation: Before you move on to the next project, there's just a few final notes about this workflow. First of all, whenever you use a video file within a photoshop document, it has to still be available on the computer. Otherwise, your photoshop file is not going to work. So video files are not automatically embedded in a photoshop document. Just to demonstrate this to you, if I rename the original video file, and I open up one of my photoshop files, like the one that we just created, it's going to come up with a warning that it can't find this file anymore. If that happens, as long as you still have the video file, you just choose relink from this menu and choose the file that was renamed. Once you choose Open, it's going to allow you to replace it, and everything should work fine. As long as it's exactly the same video, you won't have any problems there. Now, when you are ready video project, to export it as a video file, you will have to go to the file menu and then choose export, render video here at the bottom. Within this menu, you will be able to decide whether you want to export all the frames or just a certain part of your animation, and you can choose the format, the quality, and the size further up here. In case you wish to export all the frames as individual images, there's even an option for that. Just choose photoshop image sequence. And then again, you will have the option to choose the image file format and even the size of these images. That can be useful sometimes, but most of the time, I would recommend to stick to the Adobe media encoder, which is going to give you the h264 format, which is actually P four, that's the most commonly used one. Last, madam List, I just wanted to remind you that although it's fun to work with the files that we give you and recreate the things that I'm showing you, but it's always even more fun to practice on your own videos. Find a fun video that you created recently, open it up in photoshop and have fun working on your next scribble animation. 6. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.