Animating in Photoshop - Step by Step Tutorial

hey everyone welcome back to another video i've made quite a few videos showing how i animate in photoshop and i even made one that sort of covers the basics however that was quite a while ago and i feel that i could share a bit more than what was said in it so today let's do a proper deep dive into how you can get started with animation in photoshop without you having to go over all my other videos spread across this channel first off you will need a canvas to work on so let's create that i will set my resolution to be 4k so 3840 times two one sixty if you have trouble with your animation not playing back smoothly then maybe drop the resolution to normal hd like 1920 times 1080 or something i like to work in higher resolution since i put a lot of work into this i don't want my animation to look pixelated in the end so yeah i'm gonna work in 4k let's change this background color to something else something not as harsh as white [Music] to be able to animate you need to bring out the timeline you can find that up here under window timeline unless you are on some super old version of photoshop from the early 2000s then i think it should be there i'm using the creative cloud version of photoshop and i've actually downgraded my 2020 version back to 2019 for some reason they decided that i now have to enable windows ink to be able to use pen pressure in photoshop and i can't stand using windows ink and before it worked well where you could just customly or separately use pen pressure in photoshop without having windows ink so yeah i've just decided to downgrade to 2019 as that works well okay so now that we have the timeline open we have the decision to decide what type of timeline we want to work with there are two options a frame timeline and a video timeline i find the frame one pretty crude and useless so i will advise you to work with the video one there might be a use for it but i find it pretty limited to be honest let's select a video one in the timeline you see the same layers here as over here it's just laid out so that we can move back and forth in time as well if i create a normal photoshop layer and then use this slider here to zoom in on my timeline you can see the frame numbers are stated above here i can now make this layer longer or shorter if i want this is a static photoshop layer and if i draw something on it here and move back and forth in time nothing will happen it's basically always on as long as the time indicator is above this layer if i create another one draw something else on it and then make it shorter you can see that we are basically just editing with still frames here so i can slide this up and down the timeline to where i might want it now before we do anything else we should make sure to set our frame rate to what we want to work with over here on the right of the timeline there is a small menu icon that will allow you to access all the settings of this timeline here we can for example set the frame rate we might want to work in 24 frames per second or perhaps 12 if we don't want to animate on ones but rather on twos i think for this example i will choose 12 frames per second this can be changed further down the line but it can cause a bit of trouble if you have a lot of layers and it's always best to get it right in the start but yeah it can be changed later now there are two ways i like to animate whether i pick one or the other depends on what type of animation i intend to make you might have heard about the term straight ahead animation and post to post animation straight ahead animation mean i start on frame one and work my way forward chronologically through the frames that's great if i'm animating effects and fast action movements for example this explosion that i've made in a previous video was done with straight ahead animation here i don't really need to know the end state when i start i sort of just let it evolve as i keep adding frames for post to post animation i would work with keyframes where i first draw a few important frames that will be sort of the drivers for how my motion will develop for a lot of character work with acting and so on that would be the preferred method i would say now the technical difference between these is that for straight ahead animation i like to use video layers whereas for pose to pose i use a sequence of normal photoshop layers like the one we have here i will show you both so there's no confusion let's start with the video layer i will say this is the easiest way to get animating in photoshop under layer video layers you will find the option to create a new blank video layer if you want to import footage to the timeline you can also select new video layer from file let's say you have some reference footage or something but that's not what we're doing now so let's just go with the blank one let's take these things out that we had before so only the video layer and the background is left here with the video layer selected if i now start on frame 0 and draw something let's just write the numbers so 0 here if i now move one frame forward it disappears so if i now write one here and two on the following for example you can see that we can use this for animating you don't have to use the mouse to drag the time indicator like this to go back and forth between the frames the easiest way is to use the right and left arrow key on your keyboard you might have to go to the timeline menu here and enable timeline shortcuts for this to work there were a lot of people asking about that in the previous video okay so for animating a useful tool is onion skin which allows you to see a faint version of what the previous and upcoming frames looks like otherwise it can be hard to know where to place the next drawing this can also be enabled in the timeline menu here you can also find the onion skin settings which allows you to set how much opacity the frames before and after should have you can also set how many onion skin frames you want to see i will keep mine at one for both before and after and maybe set the max opacity to something like 15. that allows me to just see the frames without it being overly prominent on the screen let's remove these numbers we drew and let's just animate something easy here to demonstrate how this might work [Music] when you want to preview the animation i would suggest to turn off the onion skin as it will otherwise slow down the playback i've set this to some short commands to not always have to go into this menu here and manually click it i can show you how you can do that at the end of this video so to hit play you can either just hit the spacebar on your keyboard or this play button down here so this was straight ahead animation you can use several video layers stacked of course if you want to keep things on different layers maybe you drew some outlines on one and maybe you want to have the colors on one below for example also if you want to add in between frames to your animation between two frames you've drawn already you can set the time indicator where you want it and then go up in the layer menu and under video layers you'll find this option that you can insert a blank frame you can also delete the frame you're standing on if you want that's not the same as like erasing the drawing it's actually taking the whole frame out so it will remove it from the sequence making your clip shorter there's also an option to duplicate the frame you're standing on which can be useful if you want two of the same one for example you can also bind these functions to keyboard shortcuts to optimize the workflow here we can also find this setting is called interpret footage if you have your video layer selected you can change its frame rate here so let's say we want to change the frame rate for the entire animation then we will have to change it here for each video layer that you've created but also down here in the timeline frame rate menu can set the timeline frame rate to be 24 fps and your video layer to be 12 if you want and that way each frame of the video layers is two frames in the timeline and that's good if you only want to animate on twos but also have the options to insert frames that are only one frame long you can also move these video layers on the timeline if you want to offset your entire animation alright so let's say i want to change the position of my drawing here for this frame but not the others in the sequence if it's just a simple thing like this blob here you could of course just erase it and redraw it but if let's say this was a drawing of a full character that was not perfectly placed then you would have to make a selection first before you move it so i will just take the lasso tool and circle the whole thing and then use the move tool to position it where i want it if i don't select this drawing with a mask or like a lasso tool or whatever i actually move the whole video layer with all its frames so meaning everything would be offset also if i toggle down this little arrow here you can see which frames i have drawn on already and something you might want to do is to copy one thing from one frame to another so let's say i want to move this here to the end then i can select it with the lasso tool hit ctrl c or command c if you're on a mac and if i now go to let's say the last frame where i haven't drawn anything and if i hit to actually paste it in place you have to hit ctrl shift v to put it in the same spot and you can see it added that there so now we have an extra frame here at the end if you would want to paste this let me actually just remove that if you want to paste this somewhere whether it's already a drawing if i hit the same thing it would actually add it on a normal layer above because there's already a drawing on here so it wouldn't allow me to paste the straight on but if you just want this on here i can merge this down by hitting ctrl e and now it's part of that frame let's remove that if you want something static like a background in your animation you can always add a normal layer a normal photoshop layer and draw on that to make sure it covers the whole timeline i think this covers video layers pretty well and that's the first method of straight ahead animation now let's look at the other approach which i tend to use more for pose to pose i'm just gonna delete these video layers and start over fresh for this we won't only be using video layers but instead something else called video groups if i create two normal photoshop layers and then drag them on top of each other here in the timeline you can see that we have now created a video group i can now make each of these one frame long for example and you can stack up as many of these as you want whenever i make a new layer it becomes really long which is annoying but i have a solution for this that i'll show you in a bit so at a first glance this looks a lot less convenient than using video layers right but the advantage of this over using only a video layer is that we can say how long each of these layers should be on for so let's say that we're doing a character animation and want to linger on a drawing for a few frames then we can just extend one of these layers with a video layer you would have to copy and paste the same drawing between the frames meaning you end up with multiple individual frames with the same image and if you then want to go back and you know edit that drawing you have to recopy it across those frames and that quickly gets tedious what's cool here is that you can actually add video layers to this video group too if you know that you just want single frames over a specific time the good thing with video layers is that once you have it selected you can jump back and forth between the frames and keep painting while if you're using separate layers like these one first ones here then you have to select the one you want to paint on before it allows you to paint so yeah video layers have an advantage there i like to use this combination of the two as i can hold on specific frames with normal photoshop layers but also use the more quick workflow that comes with video layers so it's all about finding what works for what okay let me show you how you can make an action that allows you to add new frames without having to zoom out and trim it down every time up here you can find the actions menu an action in photoshop allows you to record a sequence of steps that you take within the software that you can later have one click to execute instead of having to repeat the same thing over and over in this instance we want to create a new layer and trim it down to one frame so i will click here to create a new action we can name it something handy let's go with just a single frame then you can bind it to any of your function keys if they're already occupied you can add a shift click or a control click for example i will not set any of these now as i already made these before but yeah let's hit record and then start by creating a new layer then i can trim it down and now we can hit the stop icon to stop recording if i now select this action we created and hit play here you can see that i create new frames with one click if you have this on a keyboard shortcut it's really handy you can make this for pretty much anything in photoshop so you can be creative here whenever you have a task that requires more than one step and needs to be repeated an action is perfect i use it for a lot of things one that i use a lot is when i add color to my animation i will have to show you that in another video though another way you can create a bunch of frames is by using this scissor tool here if i create a new layer like we did before so it's this long one here i can then just stand on the first frame here and hit this scissor to split it i can then move forward in time and make myself a bunch of frames this way i think the action we made is a bit more slick though this scissor can also be set to a shortcut some other bits that's useful to know are that you can set your playback resolution here for faster and more accurate playbacks down in the corner here we got this arrow this is if you want to export your animation here you can name your file and give it a location you can then select if you want to export it as an image sequence or via media encoder as a video file for example i never really use these as my pipeline always goes via after effects anyway and you can just drag your whole photoshop document into after effects and it will read it as a video file there that way i can keep working on it here and it will update in after effects as well and i don't have to render it out from here finally to bind a lot of these things that we have looked at to keyboard shortcuts you can go up here under edit and then you will find them at the bottom here there's a lot that we can go over here but some things that are useful can be to have your onion skin enabled and disabled with the with some keys and if we change the panel menus to application menus we can access the video layer function here like adding in betweens and deleting frames and so on now let's take a quick look at some different project files i have i use video layers and also video groups in the previous video i showed you how i've made this explosion you can see here that this was done using only video layers and i actually only used two one to create a rough guide for myself of how the motion was going to play out and then finally a colored version so this was a simple setup if we go over to this scene from my current film called obsession which i've also shown you here on the channel you can see that this has a lot more layers in it on this first close-up shot we got a few video groups first i made a full outline version of him i then turned that into a colored version using another video group and then i drew the mouth movements on a new video layer instead as i knew that that would move on almost every frame and we've got a similar thing going on for the second shot here [Music] here we can see that his eyes and also his mouth are on video layers while his body is made using video groups if you want to see more tutorials and videos from me that i don't post here on youtube then check out my patreon where i got a bunch of videos covering various topics i should mention before we end here that there are some extensions for photoshop that some might find useful none of those will add anything new that isn't already here but rather take some of the things that we've gone over here and make them into buttons instead of having them you know instead of having to go through the menus to find them i personally prefer to create actions and bind it to keyboard keys rather than filling the ui with buttons but i can also see that some might find that more intuitive anyways i hope i covered most things here i probably forgot something and we'll have to come back in a year and make an even longer video let me know in the comments if you find this useful or if you have any different ways of working for example feel free to subscribe head over to my patreon for more content and i'll see you guys soon bye [Music] you

Channel: Olof Storm

Views: 352,419

Keywords: animation, illustration, filmmaking, tutorial, painting, step by step, beginner tutorial, how to animate in photoshop, adobe, full tutorial, 2d animation

Id: PH7vcZjTSLA

Length: 20min 59sec (1259 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020