How To Animate in Photoshop CS6 & CC - Tutorial for Beginners

by the end of this tutorial we will learn how to make our own animations in Photoshop even if you've never opened the program before so let's get started [Music] while Photoshop is great and has awesome tools for drawing I actually wouldn't recommend it for animation there's a great free alternative called credo I already made a tutorial for it which you can watch by clicking the info card up on the top right but if you'd still like to learn how to use Photoshop and how to animate in it this tutorial is split into different sections which you can see here the video description below also has clickable links which you can go to and click on the part you want to learn first it also has a link on how to download Photoshop also in this tutorial I will be using a graphics tablet instead of a mouse if you would like to use a cheap drawing tablet that I would recommend instead of a mouse I would suggest this one I also get a small kickback if you buy anything through my Amazon links at no extra cost to you if you share my affiliate links that it helps the channel grow a lot and I really appreciate it now then with that all out of the way let's get started so first we're gonna go over the basics of Photoshop if you already know the basics and want to skip to the animation part make sure to check out the video description below so when we first opened up Photoshop we want to create a new document so let's go up to file new and it'll open up a new window where you can edit the size of your document I'm gonna change it from inches to pixels and I'm gonna change it from 300 pixels per inch which is for printing to 72 which is more for web and design and for the width I'm gonna make it 1920 and for the height I'm gonna make it 1080 as this is a standard high definition video format we'll click OK and we have our new Photoshop document so when you're using Photoshop on the Left you have your tools on the right you have your color your layers and any information on their top right you can adjust these by clicking on the different tabs to open up different parts in each section you can also click and drag these tabs to move them around if you want to reset your workspace you can go up to window workspace and click the default one so on the bottom right we have our layers panel and if you don't see that it's under window and layers so layers you can think of as stacks of paper with a new Photoshop document it automatically creates this background layer which is locked and we can't really do anything so we have to create a new layer and we can do that by clicking this new layer button down here or we can go up to layer new and click layer and we can give it a name and press ok and you can see we now have a new layer and the one that is selected is currently highlighted which is the one we'll be editing for this background layer we can't move it or do anything with it so what we can do is we can double click on it give it a name press OK and that will convert it to a regular layer that you can then move and edit and change around or if you want it to be on transparency you can also delete this background layer and this checkerboard will mean that it is transparent whatever is behind it but we'll leave the background as it is for now so I'm gonna make three layers I'm gonna make a sky layer a grass layer and a character layer so I'll double click each of these layers to rename them and I'll just quickly fill in our scene so now we have our three layers we have our character our grass layer and our sky layer so our layers we can move by clicking and holding and dragging around and you can rearrange the order that your layers appear so you can see the topmost layer is on top and the bottom most layer is behind everything to move around your drawing you can press ctrl or command + and - to zoom in and out and you can hold down the spacebar to bring up your pan tool which lets you pan across your entire drawing if you press the r key as in roger you can bring up the rotation tool which lets you rotate your canvas to reset it just go up to reset view on the top when you have the rotation tool selected and if you ever want to undo anything you can go to edit and step backwards and if you want to redo anything you can go up to edit and step forward so I have these hotkeys modified a bit differently newer versions of Photoshop they have the undo set that something else I forget what it even is but if you want to edit any hotkeys you can go down to edit and keyboard shortcuts and the undo I would definitely recommend changing so this is our keyboard shortcut window we can go up to edit and on step backwards you can press control Z to set that to undo and for step forward or redo I have it set to shift control Z or you set it to control Y which is common in other programs and what you're done modifying your hotkeys you can press ok let's talk about the tools on the side so our first tool up here is our move tool so what that does is I can select any layer I want down here and I can move it with my arrow tool if I want to move a different layer I simply select it and then I can move it if you have Auto Select turned on then whatever layer you have selected when you click is the layer that will move around so you don't have to select different layers with this turned on it can be pretty useful our next tool is our selection tools so anytime you see a little arrow at the bottom of a tool that means you can click and hold with your mouse and a sub selection of tools will pop up so here we have our rectangular selection or circle selection and then here we have our lasso tools so with any of these selections we can click and drag to create a selection and the way selections work is if I go to my paintbrush and I start painting you'll see it only stays within the selection also if I use my arrow tool to move it will only take what I have selected if I want to deselect I can go up to select and deselect or ctrl or command D so the next tool I want to talk about is the brush tool which is down here now the brush tool is pretty self-explanatory it's what you draw with if you want to select what type of brush you want to use you click this down arrow where the brush shape is and here you can adjust the size of your brush and the hardness which is how soft or how hard the edges are and then in newer versions of Photoshop you have a smoothing tool so it's at 0% and if I crank it all the way to 100 you'll see it smooths out my lines that I draw so this can be pretty useful I wouldn't recommend setting it to 100% I would probably do more like 20% or lower and then to show off the next tool I'm just gonna draw a really simple circle shape and the next tool is down here hidden underneath the gradient tool so if you click and hold you'll get your paint bucket tool so select that and then with your paint bucket tool you can select a color in the color menu and click into any enclosed area and it'll fill in and then our eraser tool is just above the paint bucket tool so you can set it to different modes we have pencil which doesn't have any smoothness to it it's just like pixel art and then we have our brush tool which has the same brush tool as before and then we can use that to erase part of our art when you're done with your artwork and you want to save it go up to file save as or save and it'll bring up your save menu so by default it wants to save as a Photoshop document or a dot PSD so dot PSD or Photoshop document is what's going to be editable so it'll retain all your layers and all your information in your scene but you won't be able to upload it to the Internet it's not a picture file it's more like the source file of your image so go ahead and save it as a Photoshop document first and then to save it as a format that you can upload to the Internet go to file save as and then where it says save as file type select that drop-down and select PNG so this is a good format because it has good transparency and it's also a smaller file size and it doesn't compress it too much so when you save it as a PNG click Save and then this menu will pop up just click OK so a good website to share your image is imager comm I don't know how to pronounce it but I'm gonna call it imager click new post click here to choose your photo navigate to your PNG that you just made click open and now you have your picture uploaded to the Internet you can click copy link up here or copy the link up here to share your image with your friends your grandma your dog your mailman your so now that the basics are all covered let's get into animation so again I wouldn't really recommend Photoshop for animating but in case you want to learn anyway here's how you do it we're gonna go over two different methods first the really easy dum-dum way and then the more advanced way so for the easy really dum-dum way we're gonna go up to file new and we'll create a new project that's 500 by 500 pixels press ok so in order to work with animation in Photoshop we first need the timeline view which we can find under window and timeline or in older versions of Photoshop this window may be called animation so for this method we don't need it right now but we can open it up anyway basically what this method is is creating one layer for every frame of animation so we'll go down to our new layer button create a new layer and we'll draw our first frame of animation first I'm gonna rename this layer to number one since it's our first drawing to create my second frame I'm gonna create another new layer and I'll call this 2 poor my frame number two and I'll go down to my first frame and I'll set the opacity which is right here on our layers to something say around like 30% or so and that will give us a little transparent ghost image so we can see how to draw the next frame so here I have my two main key poses but I want to do an in-between between these two so what I need to do is create a new layer in between 1 & 2 & 2 I'm actually going to rename to 3 I'll make a new layer and call this number 2 now and I'll set the opacity of my first drawing to about 20% and I can do that by pressing the hot key of v as in victor and then the number 2 and then on my third layer i can do the same thing I can press V and 3 to set it to an opacity of 30% and now on my frame 2 I can draw my in-between and now finally for my last keyframe I want it to loop back to frame 1 so I'm gonna duplicate my frame 1 by dragging this layer on to the new layer button down here or I can press the hotkey of ctrl J or command J to duplicate my layer I'll move this up to the top and I'm gonna hide my first two layers and then I'm gonna make an in-between between my third keyframe and the first keyframe up here so that it seamlessly loops back to the first frame so I'll make a new layer on top of number 3 and I'll call this number 4 and this will be our last frame so now that we're done with our last frame we can delete this frame 1 copy that we have here by clicking this trashcan here and that'll delete it and now we have all our frames so what we need to do is we need to make all of these frames visible and set their opacity at a hundred percent so I'm gonna click the eyeball next to these layers to make them all visible I'm gonna click my top layer hold down shift and click my bottom layer and that'll select all of my layers and then I'm gonna press the hot key of v as in victor and press the number 0 and that'll set everything to a hundred percent or you can manually set them by dragging this opacity slider here so now we have all of our frames at a hundred percent opacity and visible we can now create our animation down in our animation timeline we want to select this drop down and then click this create frame animation button but that hasn't created our animation that's only set one frame with all of our layers what we need to do is we need to click this stack of pancakes up on the top right of our timeline view and select make frames from layers so click that and it'll create a frame of animation for every layer we have you can see it created a frame for our background layer which we don't need so we can select that and press the delete button and select Yes to confirm deleting that frame and to make sure it loops when we play our animation we can select this drop down here and select it to loop forever and then when we press play our animation plays if we want to have that background be visible on all of these frames we can select our first frame of animation hold down shift select our last frame of animation go into our layers window and then click the eyeball on the background layer and that'll make the background layer visible on all the frames we have selected so now when we play our animation we have our completed drawings so in order to save this as a gif we're gonna go up to file export and save for web and this might be in different locations depending on which version of Photoshop you have but you want to look for a save for web and that'll bring up this dialog box and the first thing we need to do is we need to set this drop down to be a gif select that and under here is where you can set your options for your gif export so you can set the number of colors whether it has transparency or not and this matte is very important if you're exporting your animations and they have like a white halo around them you want to select this matte color to be either none or black and this is very important Photoshop sometimes by default will set this looping option to once so you want to make sure to set that to forever if you want your gif to loop forever and we can test it again by pressing our play button here and you can see it plays a little bit fast so let's actually fix that first I'm gonna click it done so it remembers our settings here and to change the timing on our animation we can again shift select all of our frames and on this drop-down where it says 0 seconds we can set how long each frame of animation is supposed to hold so I'm gonna select 0.1 seconds and then when we go up to save for web again and play it you can see now it's playing at a more reasonable speed so now that we're happy with our animation we can click Save and navigate to where you want to save your gif and click Save and now we have our gif animation which we can then upload to the Internet or share with friends and family so that should give you everything to get started with animation but there's a more advanced way to animate in Photoshop and we'll get started with that right now so let's make some frame by frame animation the first thing we're gonna do is go up to file new to create a new document and since we're doing a video file I would recommend putting it at 1920 by 1080 and pressing ok so this time instead of create frame animation at the bottom we're gonna click this drop down and say create video timeline and then click the video timeline button and you'll see a new layout this is a little bit more advanced but it gives us a lot more tools for animation also this is very important so every time you create a new animation in Photoshop you want to make sure to set up your frame rate first and that's under these stack of pancakes here on the top right on your timeline view and then you go to set timeline frame rate and the reason you want to do this before you start animating is because if you change your mind later Photoshop likes to delete drawings so make sure you set up your frame rate before you start anything for our project we're gonna set it at 12 frames per second and press ok so first I will need to resize this timeline Photoshop by default creates a huge long timeline and what I need is one single frame so the way I can zoom in is I can drag this bar down here at the bottom all the way to the right until I'm zoomed in enough so I can drag the edge of this frame as far to the left as I can and that'll create one frame of animation and then I can zoom in even farther to see that single frame so here we have our layer 0 which is our background layer so let's create a quick little background so here we have our layer 0 which is our background layer so I'm gonna click this lock icon to lock it so I don't accidentally draw in it so there's a couple of different methods for animating we have video groups or video layers let's go over video groups first since they're the simplest so let's create our first frame as before by creating a new layer and drawing our character so what we need to do is since Photoshop likes to create these big long timelines for every frame that you make you want to take this end and just drag it all the way to the left so that it's only one frame long it's kind of annoying it's probably the main reason I don't like animating in Photoshop but there you go once we have our first frame it gets a lot easier though to create our second frame we just want to duplicate this layer so I can do that by clicking this first layer and dragging it down to our new layer button and you'll see it creates a new layer with the same artwork but it's only one frame long so to make our animation a bit longer I'm gonna drag out our background layer so our animation lasts just a bit longer and gives us a bit more room to work with and then I'm gonna take this second layer and I'm gonna drag it over by one frame so now we have two frames of animation but you can see it's the same artwork if I were to take my lasso tool and select my frame and press ctrl or command T to move it around and say move it up here I press Enter you can see our two frames are moving back and forth and to flip back and forth you can actually use keyboard shortcuts and to enable that we want to click under our stack of pancakes here on the top right on our timeline window and select enable timeline shortcut keys so with that on you can now use the arrow keys to move back and forth in your timeline which is pretty useful so the next thing you want to do is you want to move this down on to the same layer so it doesn't just create a whole staircase of frames and we can do that by clicking and dragging this frame just down onto the layer underneath it and you can see that creates it into a video group now so now we can show and hide our whole animation by clicking the visibility on our video group and for the second frame I'm actually going to redraw it so I'm gonna take my lasso tool select my art and press Delete and you can see it's not deleting because on Photoshop it's not the layer that you have displayed it's actually the layer you have selected that you're editing so I need to click my second frame and then delete so you'll notice that with Photoshop whatever layer you have selected either in the timeline or on your layers window is what layer you're gonna be editing and to make that a bit easier under your move tool you can enable this auto select layer button and that way you can just click with your move tool and it'll automatically select whatever layer that you want to edit so now we want to take our brush and draw our second frame but we can't see what our previous frame was we have to enable something called onion skin which is a term in animation where you can see your past drawings and your future drawings and it makes animating possible to enable it we want to click our stack of pancakes again and click enable onion skins so now we can see what our previous frame was I'm gonna draw my next frame with him starting to squish down so in animation there's a concept called squash and stretch and it looks pretty cartoony but you can actually see it happening in real life - if you look up slow-motion pictures of a golf ball being hit and what it means is characters can squish down or stretch out as long as their volume stays consistent and you'll see me experiment with this bouncing ball animation it's a really fun animation principle and there's actually 12 principles to go over if you'd like to learn more about animation principles and more advanced animation techniques I would recommend picking up the animator survival kit which is a really good book I wish I had it as a kid so we have our two main key poses here and we want to do some in-betweens between them so like before we're gonna take our first frame of animation and drag it onto the new layer button and that'll create a duplicate frame ahead of it and move everything ahead of it down one frame so again I'm gonna take my lasso tool and select that artwork and press Delete and now I can draw an in-between between these two drawings and we're just gonna continue this process by clicking and dragging our frames to create a new one and then taking our lasso tool and deleting that artwork and if you want to see more or less frames in your onion skin you can go under our stack of pancakes again and go to onion skin settings and you can say how many frames before or frames after I'm going to set this to 3 and press ok and then keep drawing in betweens so now we have our character squashing down in anticipation for our next animation and if we want any of these frames to hold we can click and drag on this outside and drag it out so this frame holds for longer so that's how you create an anime and video groups so with this method it's very easy to take these different frames and move them around and delete them or rearrange them the next method we're gonna go over is called video layers which you might like out of their simplicity of use but rearranging frames is very difficult on them it's possible but it's not very easy to do so they're really bests or very straightforward animation and to create a video layer we're gonna go up to layer video layers and create new blank video layer and you'll see that creates a blue layer right here so I'll just animate straight ahead so you can see how video layers work I'll draw my first frame and then when I use my arrow tool to move on to the next frame you'll see it's automatically blank so I don't have to keep creating new frames every single time I can just animate straight forward you can also see on the second layer that I'm practicing stretching instead of squashing so he's stretching to move on to his next position but he still has the same volume as he had on his first layer so when you're animating it can be useful to have the first layer of your animation just for reference so you always can refer back to your original drawing so I'm gonna take my first layer duplicate it and move it outside of the video layer group by dragging it down here and you'll see if I minimize my video layer group by clicking this arrow you can see my first frame is now outside of it and in my timeline here I'll make it last for the entire length of my animation by dragging it out like so and I'll set its opacity to 30% so now when I go back into my video layers group I can always go back into my first layer and just trace over it or use it as a reference for my next frame and then I can select it with my lasso tool and press ctrl or command T and then move it in the place I want it to be so straight-ahead animation means you start with the first drawing then you keep going forward in your animation kind of feeling where the motion is going to go post opposed method is more planned out animation where you draw in your first keyframes or your main storytelling poses first and then you do the in-between second there is no right or wrong way of animating and everyone's method is different try experimenting and see which one works best for you and there we have our completed animation so that's how to animate with video layers and video groups so now that we have our animation finished let's export it as a video to export it as a video file we go up to file export and render video and this will bring up this render video popup and most of this you can keep the same the only thing you want to change is what you name your file as and also select the folder you want to save it in so I'll pick the folder where I want it to save click select folder give it the name that I want and click render so now we have our animation saved as a dot mp4 file so this video file we can now upload to YouTube and I'll show you how to do that really quickly so go to youtube.com make sure you're signed in to your own account and click this little plus button on the top right then select upload video and then if you want your video to be public select public or if you just want to share it with certain friends and family you can select it as unlisted since this is just an example I'm gonna leave it unlisted for now then I'm gonna click this up arrow to select the file I want to upload then I'll navigate to my files and select the dot mp4 that we created and click open and then I'll give it a name and a description and then once I finished naming everything I can click done to save it and once it's done uploading it'll be available at this URL right here which you can copy with ctrl C and then paste with ctrl V and you can now send this link to all your friends family anyone you want to send it to and that's how you create an animation for YouTube with Photoshop stay tuned because I'll go over some extra tips and tricks that you might find helpful so in this section I'll talk about tips and tricks to help you with your animation as well as other animation techniques that you can use the first one we're gonna go over is a quick shortcut that'll help you and we can do that under edit keyboard shortcuts so with this window open the first thing we want to do is under this drop down under application menus we want to select that and select panel menus and that will give us access to our timeline window so the shortcut I'd recommend is to enable onion skins which is under timeline video so click this arrow to expand that and scroll down until you get to enable onion skin and a good shortcut for that could be ctrl white and if it's a shortcut that already exists it'll tell you but if it's for something that you're not going to use very often you can go ahead and click accept and that'll turn onion skins on with ctrl Y which is a super useful shortcut to turn if you want to import audio into your animation you can go down to your audio track down here on your timeline window and select the drop down from this musical note and select add audio and then select your music file and click open and you'll see this green bar showing that our audio track has been added but of course it's longer than our animation so we need to drag the end of it so that it matches the length of our animation and then if you want to add a fade in or a fade out you can click this triangle on the right side here and select how long you want the fade in or the fade out to be so we'll just put one second on each and press Enter and now when we play our animation you can see a place with audio you can't really lip-sync with audio in Photoshop because you can't scrub your timeline and hear the audio at the same time so if you want to map out lip-sync you'll probably have to do it in a different program but that's how you import audio into Photoshop if you have a video that you want to animate on top of you can go up to file import and select video frames to layers and then select the video that you want to animate on top of and then click open and then this dialog will pop up usually you can just leave it just like this and press ok and then it'll import your video into Photoshop now by default Photoshop makes this into a frame animation but we want to work in a timeline so we can click this button down here on the bottom left to convert it to an animation timeline so to create a layer that I can animate in I'm gonna select the topmost layer here in my timeline and then I'll go up to layer video layers and new blank video layer so that'll add a new blank video layer but it lasts a bit longer than my current video so I need to drag this endpoint down so it matches the rest of my video like so so now I can go through frame by frame and just animate on top of this layer and I'll turn on enable onion skin so I can see my past frames and just add a cute little explosion effect to this handshake and now we have a little animation on top of a video if you want to animate a photo you can do that by importing the photo and we do that by going up to file and place embedded or in other versions of Photoshop it'll be called place and I'm going to select the photo that we want to animate and click place and this will place your image inside the document and we can move it around and scale it and then when you're done just press Enter or click this check mark up here and that'll import your image into Photoshop so to prepare this for our animation I'm going to cut out the parts that I want to animate and I'm going to be using the polygonal lasso tool to select these different parts and I'll cut them out and paste them on their own layers and I'll also import a new background using the same file and place method so here we have our three elements we have business man 1 and business man 2 and our background layer now we're ready to turn this into an animation so to create an animation out of this we're going to select this drop-down and we'll say create video timeline and click that button and this will set up our project as an animation so again the first thing we want to do is set our framerate by clicking the stack of pancakes and setting our frame rate will set it at 24 frames per second for this one and then again I want all of this to last just for one frame so I'm gonna go through each of my layers and just drag the edges of these timelines all the way to the left until they only last for one frame except for the background which dictates how long my animations going to be I'll leave that one a bit longer and then we'll zoom in using the slider on the bottom here and this is my original image we don't need it for animation so I'm gonna click this drop down here and say delete track and then to animate these photos it's just the same process as we were doing before so I'm gonna take my first guy I'm gonna duplicate the layer that'll create a new frame that's one frame long and I'll move it into the second position and I'll do the same thing for second businessman I'll duplicate his layer and then I'll drag that into the same timeline so now we have two video groups for each character so now I can go through and just select what frame I want to animate and just use my ctrl T or command T to transform it or another feature that Photoshop has is under edit and puppet warp so what you can do here is add pins into your object by clicking where you want the pivots to be and then once you have a pivot you can drag it around and then when you're done with your transform you just click the checkmark and that'll make a puppet transformation so that's a really quick and easy way to manipulate a photo in Photoshop I'm gonna continue animating by duplicating layers and just transforming each frame until I have my completed animation then we'll see what it looks like at the end of it and there we have our completed animation using images there's some really creative things you can do with this you could use the selection tool to select different body parts and put them on different layers this is just a really simple example to get you started and with that that's the end of my how to animate in Photoshop tutorial I hope you found it helpful and if you did be sure to give it a like subscribe and share it with any friends or coworkers that want to animate in Photoshop thanks for watching you guys and I really appreciate it until next time take care and I'll see you later the blah blah [Music]

Channel: Jesse J. Jones

Views: 258,837

Keywords: photoshop tutorial, photoshop tutorial for beginners, adobe photoshop tutorial, adobe photoshop tutorial for beginners, photoshop, download photoshop, download photoshop cc 2019, photoshop cs6 tutorial, photoshop tutorial beginner, how to use photoshop, 2019, how to animate, how to make a gif, cartoons, how to draw, photoshop cs6, photoshop cc, photoshop animation, animated gif photoshop, cs6, photoshop animation tutorial, photoshop tutorial 2019, animating in photoshop

Id: ymQJbN5M1Y8

Length: 28min 32sec (1712 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019