Photoshop Animation Techniques (Redux, Creative Cloud)

hi guys my name is Alex Greg and I have made a little tutorial on how I animate in Photoshop this is a slight update on my tutorial from a couple of years ago that a lot of people seem to enjoy hey get something out of or think I'm crazy for animating in Photoshop but I still do it and I still love it and yeah I'm hoping to teach I'll share some of the things I've learned I really lost complete yes and with the latest versions of the software so hopefully I can I can convey some of that stuff to you I've been working in a lot of different projects this is something that I did for Cartoon Network and this was all done in Photoshop animation you can see here this is animated at 4k and video layers and normal layers and things like that there are all things that we'll go over in the tutorial and these are some scenes from my short film phantom limb once again all animated in Photoshop frame by frame I should say straight up this isn't for people who are new to photoshop if you're new to photoshop there's probably better software packages out there for you this is really a tutorial aimed at people who like using Photoshop to create images and want to be able to make them move this is one of the main reasons I like using Photoshop for animating is because there's no gap between the design and the animation process they're all one single sort of you know action really if I can draw it if I can design it if I can make it look good I can make it move as well because it just means doing it twice or three times or whatever and before we get too far along I want to introduce you to our Gibson I don't know four years ago or five years ago when I worked in a short film with Ari the team in in Australia on a film called the cat piano and a lot of the stuff that we that I learned originally was from Ari and the crew the cap you know so credit where credit's due go check out his work mechanical Apple comm and I know they've got some sweet work coming up really soon so yeah get on top of that because they're sweet dudes and they're super good at what they do just to give you a bit of a heads up what's gonna happen in the tutorial I will be starting with the sort of fundamental sort of steps in the animation process that I use and then moving on to a bit deeper workflow and then I'll be moving on to a few extra tricks and tips to I don't know to give you a bit of a head start so you don't have to spend as much time figuring it out as I did okay I hope it helps I hope you enjoy it yeah thanks hey guys so I've got Photoshop open at the moment this is Photoshop Creative Cloud you'll need at least photoshop cs3 extended I think and then extend it all the way through up to cs6 and then in Creative Cloud you just get the full package which is nice there will be a few terminology issues before cs6 so hopefully hopefully my previous tutorial will cover a lot of that stuff and this one will be dealing in the new terminology okay so first up I really just want to get you to dive in see how all the bits of it work in context and then later on we'll make a a more in-depth tutorial so first things first there's kind of three main alkalyn types three main methodologies that I use in Photoshop animation so one would be animation that's very similar to my last tutorial but I've got a bunch of new stuff that I need to do cuz it's a later version video layers is something that I always avoided but it's actually a lot faster for certain kinds of animation and cleanup and color so I use that a lot these days and especially in combination these two and then the third type which I don't use that much but I know everyone likes it and it's really designed for this sort of thing video group groups just a much more organized way of keeping the layers and stuff so I'm gonna go through and get you guys set up with each one of each of these so you can see it and then later on we'll talk about workflow stuff making you work faster and more efficiently so we'll go firstly we'll start at layer on a mission we'll make a new file you know we don't need to work in these TV presets but um I tend to find that it it it's good so the first step for any any animation despite that despite the one of the three techniques I'm gonna show you is to go down to timeline and open up the timeline window and then say you create video timeline now this would give you a 5 second clip of nothing at the moment but you don't mean you can scrub through this playhead anyway thing and this acts almost like a premiere or After Effects later now okay so the next thing we need to do is enable our timeline shortcut keys so if we click that you need a little arrow tick next to it and what your enable timeline shortcut keys are going to let you do is use the new hot keys that cs6 and both have brought in to navigate your timeline so if you press right now you'll go forward in time if you press left you go back in time you press up you go to the start of the time of the lair and if you press down you go to the end of the time of the lair there's a slight bug where if you create a new layer that starts at time zero these hotkeys won't work for you straight away so you need to create a layer anywhere else from that it'll it'll work for you fine maybe that'll get updated by the time you watch this anyway okay so and then the first thing I always do when I start a new file is set the framerate at the moment I'll make it 24 frames per second because it's so it's a really it's a really convenient framerate to animate to it's what the old old masters you stannum interview and I and I think that's particularly important except that it's great for dividing each second into into halves and quarters and things like that so it's quite an easy number to divide and it's also the standard frame rate for film the other thing that won't be set up when you come in is that it'll have a little thumbnail for each layer and I find that that gets a little bit cumbersome quite quickly so I usually say panel options and they go down to no thumb down okay so we've got our little timeline here we've got the play controls here I can play your next variant previous frame in turn sound on and off Photoshop isn't so great for sound still you can't scrub sound as far as I know I could be wrong I've only just started using Creative Cloud so maybe maybe that fix up but I don't think they have okay so the first thing we want to do is create a new layer and that'll create a layer starting from wherever your playhead is better become important later but at the moment which dragged it back to zero and we'll make a little drawing for first keyframe so I'm gonna make an eyeball because human beings like eyeballs that are the bouncing balls so I make it a little bit reptilian okay so something you'll see is like an advantage of a flash not so much TV paint an advantage of a flash is the drawing tools are obviously a lot more friendly in Photoshop and that's the real reason that I'd like to use it because of that I mean I love flash but I really don't like drawing in flash and I know there's gonna be people out there dealing if they can do this games when I say that all right so I'll just have a basic eyeball it's a creepy eyeball all right and now I'm like okay so I want to make the next keyframe there's a little trick that I use and he's all the time I press V and then if you press 3 it'll make your opacity 30% or if you press v + 6 it'll make your opacity 60% so I usually use 30 that's a nice opacity now let's create a new layer and then I'll say okay I want a closed eyelid okay so this is close okay so now eyelid eyelid and I probably want one in between for when it opens also found that I just generally have a little bit of ease when they opening up they can sometimes have an over blink where they open up wider and sometimes have like a slew we but they usually usually open slower than they closed you have a lot of fun with thinks I'm sure the people yelling at the computer screen that's you I'm sorry if I've said something wrong about blinks I'm actually gonna make the people a little bit bigger for this strain just because I think he's kind of reptilian I think you might open his eye a little bit his pupil might violate it a little bit when he closes he's high it's a good stop at night okay these little details back around I see this is just like a rough pass okay so I've got these three frames I'm gonna sit there a pasady back to a hundred and a quick way to do that is press the V and then zero the V of zero can actually do it for all of the frames at the same time as well so be 30 V 3 and then easier you may find that you crazy zero and it makes it 0% that's something that's been introduced in cs6 it's it's a bit finicky sometimes ok so we've got this and I'm like what do I do with it now I hope you see it's not what I want so I'm gonna shorten this south remember five seconds it's too long I mean a blink it's only gonna be like a second worth of animation in there that's worth looking at so I'll shorten everything and that's gonna shorten everything down here and you can also shorten the amount that you play by stretching these in and out points here okay so let's say this is the open frame so we're gonna keep that open of ages we have the the closed key yeah and then we have the halfway point that eases out into the open that's a little bit longer moment you'll find that if you zoom in and out it'll change the threshold for where you can house more we can make these and where they snap to a little bit creepy I think that generally my idea for that dilated pupil was a little bit off I'm into some you know reduce it a little bit and you know normally I wouldn't and they share me messing around like this but sometimes it's good to see in tutorials when you're not happy with something and you gotta fix it all right so yeah now we've got a blinking blinking eye which you know it's gonna blow people's socks off okay the next step you know you want to send it to all your friends you can go file export render video you can use a h.264 render I tend to use if I'm just doing a quick test I'll do h6 h.264 if I'm doing a high quality I'm doing something high quality I will typically make a Photoshop image sequence and then I'll explore as a PNG sequence and this gives you a whole bunch of files that will spit out and be really useful in After Effects so at the moment we're gonna collect blink one and I always put like a little underscore there just so that these guys take that mixed up creating yourself alone let's make this into my club off 13 yep okay put it in here click click your new subfolder and we will render and then we get this little thing I just keep it normal then I'll export sequence and unless you're using After Effects this isn't gonna be super useful but yeah I mean everything I do usually goes through a pass of After Effects at the end of any website and it generally has better encoding at the end then Photoshop the other thing you can do and I know lots of people will do this so I'm gonna get into it first it's creating a gif so you just say I always use ctrl alt shift s and to say save for web and then you downsize it to maybe 100 that's too small for 100 okay Benna we want looping forever I don't know why once is a default I don't know who would ever want once but okay now we have that and we can save that into the folder that we want oh the unit okay so we've got that that's the first method next method I'm going to show you is video layers so make a new one okay create a new video timeline all the same as before it's a timeline frame rate we have to do this again let's make it I'm gonna make it twelve frames that's as though actually I'll make it 24 for this and twelve for x1 so 24 for this one and now we're gonna make a new kind of layer this is a technique that I always avoided until until I actually had to animate a lot of stuff for phantom limb so you go to layers video layers new blank video layer and then I'll create this new video layer it's good looks like a little tiny icon it's different and that essentially means like this is a timeline and every time you shift a frame it's going to be a new image so it's like a whole bunch of frames all rammed into one layer it took me a long time to get into this method because it's a little bit of a jump into the darkness because unlike flash you can't see the lines between all these keyframes you can't see little of what they might be you don't know if there's any drawings on them so you have to be quite organized with how you deal with it this is particularly good for drawing for doing straight-ahead animation effects animation and it and the other thing that's really good for is cleanup in color because it just condenses everything to one layer and it's quite quick then to use okay so so we've got on you layer and this is where shortcut keys come in really handy so left and right can toggle between frames forward and back much like the comer in full stuff in fact I'm gonna get my brush and I'm gonna show you this is kind of like the style that's really well not the stuff this is like a version that's quite good for a final meeting this way so I've got a little dot say something simple is what I'm trying to say animating quite simple stuff is good for this one though this little dot and and this time around we're gonna use onion skins and able onion skins so what other schemes do is show you before and after I was like a little overlay typically I set that to a hotkey control Y and I'll do that later on but just for speed we're gonna ignore that so now all I'm doing is I'm just drawing straight ahead so I'll say okay that's the first frame this is a second frame there's a third frame and each time I'm just pressing right to move through these these these little things so I got my little dot he's sort of chilling out and then I'm gonna make him go quite far and and slow down so this is like a really really good way to experiment with timing spacing without having a to worry about anatomy and things like that so if you're looking for a just a way to play with animation this is a really really good sort of way to work if you're thinking maybe I want to see more than one frame you can go to onionskin settings before and after I'll make it - before - after you can also change from multiply to these different things and you'll find that different drawings will be more useful multiply is pretty solid for black-on-white drawings then okay so you can see toggle through as I'm flipping through the flip book okay I don't know how this is gonna look that's why it's kind of fun to do things this way if you've seen the film I worked on phantom limb all of the gooe gooey-- effects were done this way and I think who has kind of been have it it's being used a lot in the last couple years so if you're wondering how they're doing it it's probably similar to the straight-ahead method alright so I'm gonna turn off onion skin settings I'm gonna turn off onion skin and now I'm just gonna play okay so that's quite I like an energetic little admission and of course yeah of course you can you can you can make the feeling of your animation hell if you want but that's it's kind that's working video there's it takes a while to UM to get your head around things as far as well took me a while to get my head around things so there's lots of little things that you're like okay well I kind of want to put a frame in between here but I can't really see between these two things all you need to do is go to layer video layers and then maybe you want to insert a blank frame and that's gonna push all these frames back and put a blank frame in here and that probably seems kind of crazy because you can't see what's between you can't really sort of gauge it's not the most intuitive way of working but later on I'll show you all the hotkeys I use for that for that and it becomes a little bit more intuitive he's become sort of muscle memory like any any software package does after a while so there's this a bit of barrier for entry in that one okay so there's that which is pretty fun way to to practice think now the third method is one that I don't use very much and it's not because it's bad I just haven't needed to because both those methods kind of work well together and this method is kind of a it's kind of an animation of the two but I haven't found a great way to work it into my the way my brain works so okay so as always at your timeline frame rate I'm gonna get twelve frames per second which is like animating on twos and later on we can change it by the moment we'll get 12 frames per second and just makes it a little bit lighter on the machine as you're working as well okay so I'm gonna this is that inconvenient thing where it wants to make it really long okay okay so once again let's make what should we do have it thought about this one okay we got this little guy who looks really pathetic little fellow alright now we're gonna make a nother layer let's make another layer that's kind of see how it makes it really lump later on I'll show you some actions to make this quicker but this is a way to make all of your layers the same length so you don't have to keep shortening them you do certifcate it select all with a control a delete with delete control D to deselect good naive it'll add it's the same thing usually it's 30 and later and I'll show you that the action that you need to make to make that just one button push all right so we'll make another keyframe brush the same mm-hmm okay usually I would I try to be a little bit more structural and he'll I draw because this guy's gettin all wonky um I'm being kind of self-conscious at the minute because watching me all right so we've got these two keyframes that guy and that guy and these will I browse mmm look at him you're super sad alright now we're like okay so he wanted to be that long you're gonna kill all the now on that long that's kind of cool so that's the same way as it was working before might delete that I have something that I use a lot which I didn't mention earlier but it's super useful and I didn't mention it because it's become just sort of how I work in Photoshop now and I don't think about it by default or disliked when you press the V or this that is off if you turn that on that'll just mean that every time you're over the frame you can just click on the pixel that's in the frame and that'll select your layer and then it just means you won't be having to wrestle with these all the time which honestly is is a nightmare so I would use the the auto select option as you can and you see what I just did that's accidentally click that one and that's a pain that's the one thing that's annoying when you my just delay this is because they like easy is there okay you can have he is all right this guy's sad all right what you can do now is just just drag this down onto the same way up and you can see over here it's called video group one and it's called video group one over here as well so it's kind of a weird beast now so it's got really great things like if you shortness it's gonna push all this back is gonna save that timing which is really nice now if I want to create an in-between it's kind of weird so if I just create another frame another layer here he creates a five second gap and it's like oh you've messed up all my timing and you get a pull up acting yeah that's that's not so great so I delete that cuz that's kind of boring alright so I'll make I'll just duplicate this guy duplicate this bike riding on to new and I'll shorten this shorting this one you see how it's the same timing I'm sure some someone smart can think of an action that does this automatically but I haven't I haven't really given it enough thought I don't think so now I just deleted that guy and I'll turn I'm right on the in skating okay I will do in between if you're just new to animation this is where all the fun happens all the other juicy stuff happens in in the in-betweening Casilla breakdowns if you're not new to any mission you'll probably think I'm crazy just so you can see it's kind of be confusing to draw like this sometimes so what I would normally do is sort of do this very structurally and have these things and I make sure these goods are right and then I would then I'm turn off on your skinny turn off from skinning see like that that really needs to be figured out then I would flick back between them and flicking I find it's a much more a much better way to keep physicality to the drawings rather than kind of like blending drawings together but I mean I'm not gonna try to tell you how to draw because you were all probably hundred times better than me baby's insane eyes maybe so I said that the fun this can be kind of changing in between and then that's a very vanilla in-between because it's kind of halfway between the two but you know this is an animation classes for triplets okay so at the moment only one frames it's probably gonna be too fast you know it's doing this thing yeah and then you can obviously I don't know I would I would probably put a little antic here and then the little E's out here they're moving a whole bit of overlap on the hip okay but that's basically it that's that's all you need to know it's like this is just like layers animation but it's a little bit more organized the reason I don't use it so much is that all of my actions don't work with this because as i said when you duplicate this it changes all your timing which is it's not something up you never to get my head around just yet it's not something i've had to meet i've needed to solve but it might be something here into and i get asked about it a lot so okay so that's the three main methods and now i'm gonna go on and try to show some workflow tips for all of these methods to make them actually workable within the scene okay so this is the part of the tutorial that i start going into deeper methods and these are just about making Photoshop a usable production tool a lot of what i've shown you so far as like practical and anyone can make stuff quickly with it but if you're doing it all day every day you really want to be finding ways to make things quicker and quicker and quicker and just more intuitive so it's getting in less in the way of your creative process I think so what I've got here is a file and it looks like chaos but it's being built up over maybe like four or five days so it makes sense as you build it you can see down here appear the frame rate of 25 frames per second and I'm using a combination of the methods so I've got the layer method here and I've decided to use the layer method for this guy because the style of the film I made used into the shot was from I was using quite a limited style of animation for a lot of the character stuff here he's got like long holds he's got a couple of little variations here where it blinks you noticing there's no line boil either sorry because there's not a lot about a mission and I decided to use the layer method for the hand however for the limbs it's moving most of the time it's quite a smooth movement and it's got this straight ahead goo animation as well this sort of ghostly stuff coming off it I did do this again in comp where it sort of has a bit of the movement so it's flying around but that's a story for another day so for this stuff I used the video layer these two video layers and the main ones and up here these little ones here when I switch from 12 frames per second to twenty-five twenty twelve point five frames per second to twelve and a half Franciszek from twelve and a half frames per second to 25 frames per second I had to add someone's in there and that's the reason I switched was to add someone's for this have some impact from this this break so you could feel it a bit more I mean I would have ideally like to animate a lot more once but its life sometimes so you can see that I've got these two methods that are working together for different parts the animation where I feel like they're the right thing to be doing and also something that is worth thinking about is that if I'm done with this scene and I'm not working on it anymore I'll quite often use this third method consolidating everything down into one layer which can be make it easier to organize so yeah this doesn't do anything at moments okay so now what I'm going to do is show you some ways to speed up working using the three different methodologies okay okay so there's a couple of quick things we can do to work up all to help with all of the different methods so the first thing is I'll set my hotkey for enabling onion skinning to control Y you can use whatever you back for that one but I like control Y because it's a hot key at the moment that does something it puts things into CMYK proofing which sometimes messes up me when I'm working so I'm gonna kill two birds with one stone so it's an application now it's in panel menus I know my news down to timeline video then down to enabling skinny it's already on control way so that's that's all you want I'll say accept okay and the other thing I use a lot of is toggling the move tool onto Auto Select and layer I do it a lot so if you haven't set that up already put that in because I don't mean that you can just click on whichever pixel you want to start editing and I don't mean you don't have to dig through your layers in the timeline or here as well so a big part of animating in Photoshop is learning to get around the limitations of the program and sort of harnessing the strengths for your own sort of gain what what I always do is set up some actions and this is gonna seem really boring and a lot of hard work honestly it only takes about five minutes once you understand what it is and you do it once and you never have to do it again unless you move on to a different machine and you know I would I would just give you files to download but I feel like if you understand this process you'll be able to make sweet new actions and share them with people and share them with me and stuff so hopefully this isn't too boring okay so the first the first set I'm going to show you is four layer animation and it's quite similar to my last tutorial so if you've got this under your belt maybe you can move on but so four layer method what I want to do is I want to be able to create a new frame I want to be able to say well I kind of want to duplicate this I want to set the opacity down I want it bleep this guy and now I want to be able to draw over it so I can have in between which is a lot of work just to create a new frame in flash and TV paint there's one a single button for that so let's we can we can do something similar yeah so this is the layout of the of the action that we're going to create if you haven't created actions before I wouldn't be too afraid of them I was kind of afraid when I first started it just seemed like an extra hoop to jump through but once you start using them you'll love them to bring up your action see if we can get everything in the frame okay so bring up your action panel and I made a little folder here for animation toot and I'm gonna say new action was a new frame and even when you're not animating to actually use this action a fair bit so I'm gonna stop that I'm gonna stop that for a second because it's selecting a document all right now I'm in the right document so the first thing we want to do is make sure recording and then we press V and then three and that'll set our opacity bits ready then we'll duplicate our layer by dragging onto the new layer thing here and we'll say ctrl a ctrl a to select all press Delete to delete everything press ctrl D to deselect everything and then press speak and the 0 she said your opacity back to 100 and then you can stop and that's one third of your actions made right there this is new frame and then the handy thing you can do is put this onto an action button so I'm gonna make this f2 because I use it all the time so now when I press f2 it's gonna make a new layer on top that's clean and I can draw over it so you can use this either for creating in-betweens so you just go like that mountainy between layer or you can use it for gradient cleanup layer on top of this guy it's some nice big fat at the moment I'm just pressing f a lot F changes your framing and then R changes your rotation and they've got a kind of rough okay alright so that is one third all the way through thanks for sticking with me all right so the next thing we want to do is let's do a clean up frame so that we've got a frame to color because when i first started using photoshop animation i was a little bit concerned that you wouldn't be able to color the line work very easily and honestly it's if you've got it if you've got kind of a not totally loose style of your final cleanup for drawings the colouring process is quite easy so okay let's say we want to color this inside this inside bit yeah you need a layer below it no good at there below it and we want to select everything in it and now if I just if I just fill that it's gonna have this gross anti-aliasing here so what we need to do is start expanding that selection into that line and then we fill it okay so let's make another action and we'll call it start make a new action but expand bill and say record okay we're gonna start recording throw it away because firstly we need to make our selection and now we can start recording so now we can say edit no sorry we can say a select let's bring up our window so we can see I'll just keep this open so that you don't get too lost so I'll just keep this open today get to lost in the in this process you can read it yeah alright because this one's a bit of a mouthful but it's actually quite simple alright so we've selected that we'll say record and we'll say select modify expand and I'll make it two pixels depending on the resolution you're working out you might need to change that and then what we want to do is press alt open square bracket and that'll step to the layer below and then we want to press alt backspace to fill that selection with our foreground color which is black and then I wanna press Alt close square bracket to step back up the layer and then ctrl D to deselect and then stop I'm gonna call that I'm gonna change didn't the number the function key to f3 so now we have a sweet function button they can fill any any closed shape basically and the last action I want to create for you is creating a new color layer because you saw earlier that it was a bit of a rigmarole to create a color layer and when we're coloring and cleaning up we kind of want the least resistance possible so I will create a new action I'm gonna call it you look there this is really similar to how you frame action but it's just stepping back a layer it's creating a layer below the other layers all right so it's none of that cool so we're recording on our new color layer duplicate it now we need to step back a layer with bolt open square bracket oh yeah and now we still need to say control a to select everything delete to delete everything from that first layer control D and then I'll close square bracket just step back up to this top layer and press stop and I'm gonna call I'm gonna give that the f4 button okay so that's some three actions that'll save us some a bunch of time actually so one big thing that's changed a lot since my first tutorial is that a use video layers a lot more now and I use them a lot more for both animating and also for a color and cleanup and before I get too far into the video layer method I need to just give you a little bit of a primer into what a video li it is because when you start using it it's a little bit of a black box sort of situation you can't really look inside it like you can a flash timeline or any other timeline that you typically use for animating so I'll create a new blank video layer move it over here you can see it's a lot like an After Effects timeline it's a lot like a premiere timeline which is great for dealing with film but not so great for dealing with animation so you'll have to start visualizing it well this is how I visualize it it's kind of like a column and inside it are these invisible lines that break up the frames and they'll always be one frame they'll always be broken up into one frame you can't use things like in flash where you can have one drawing held for two frames you kind of have to duplicate each of those frames that you want to hold for to really get the most out of using video Lee at the video Leah method we need to set up some hot keys so that creating a blank frame is one button duplicating a frame is another button deleting a frame a new video they are all hot keys so I'll go how to do this it's actually probably set up already and so we want the application move the application menu and we want to go to layer and then we go down to new blank video layer insert blank frame duplicate frame and lead frame I use control V control alt B and control besh shift control B to do these basic ones because I use them all the time and when you first come in they're probably not allocated to hotkeys that you you'd already use and you can use it all with your left hand which is really important because your right hand is going to be drawing the more difficult one to access is the cold shift control B and that's for creating a new blank near layer that one is kind of hard to use with one hand but you don't have to do it that often so let's go back to our little eyeball over here and it's color way cuz I'm gonna start doing this in the video layers now all right and I'm gonna create a new video layer control ctrl alt shift B I know they sound like a mouthful but after like a day of animating you're going to be just on cruise control with them you'll just be using them all the time I'll put these guys into a group turn the opacity down and this is typically how I work at the moment I use this for I typically do my blocking in a with the layers and then I do my actual animation with with this method so let's say we want to do a cleanup frame of this I I'm using the way clean up for you loosely in this tutorial I'm gonna say but I know you don't want to see me sweating over lines too much okay all right so we've got that that frame we get that frame and we got that frame so I'll do cleanup frame of this one and I'll to clean up frame in okay so we've got this kind of cleaned up frames and now this is where there's a bit of a leap I've turned off my head my blocked out drawings and that kind of timed out the way that I want them and now we have to kind of take a backwards step where we've got these blank frames for holds so the first thing I do is duplicate this frame because it's meant to be held for a bunch of frames so we've got a hotkey for duplicating a frame do you remember this let's see so here so duplicating a frame is ctrl alt beat so we go to the frame wheel up press ctrl o B once twice now we have to delete these blank frames by pressing ctrl shift B twice now get this little hold okay all right now I want to put it in between in so what do I do all right so I want to slightly tweak everything in this frame so I'll press ctrl a and then just delete it and I'm press ctrl Y now to turn on that onion skinning okay I'm just drawing this little in between okay get a little in between first control why to turn off I'm skinning now we can just step through our frames with our left ear right okay and this just do one more in between thanks for a bit funny so friendly we normally have a lot of time between these two let's have a clench okay it's really fast now because I don't have a hold at the start so how do we do that alright I'll select it all ctrl C to copy it I'll make a layer ctrl V now this is a really quick way of making a giant hold okay so we've used up video la here I'll get out a little like a couple of frames of animation let's say we want to make a color layer now we'll make a new video layer by pressing ctrl alt shift B move it up to the start of this as well I mean they call it now we can use the same actions from before so press f3 to fill like that one press f3 to fill and if you like alright so I'm gonna fill this section here so I'll do that pressing f3 f3 3 and now we're gonna fill out holes so I'll press f4 to create a new color layer select it f3 to fill its like this one f3 to fill and a wall up I know what this sounds like a real I don't know it's one way of doing things sometimes but once you get the hang of it you'll just sort of ease into it and you'll find ways that you prefer working as well I feel kind of like I need to explain a couple more things before I move on before with with video layers earlier I I've been saying from the start that we need to set our timeline frame rate as soon as we open our scene and that has to do with one of the quirks of using time lines within Photoshop when you create a video layer or actually any layer it inherent the the framerate of the scene that you created with so at the moment I'm working at 12 frames per second so this this layer this video layer has been has these invisible folds in it twelve times for every second which is great when we're working with twelve frames per second but if I want to work at 12 frames per second and then later I want to switch to 24 frames per second it's a little bit of a pain so I'll just quickly show you that so if I say to set timeline frame rate and I say 24 now when we skip through this this this layer holds each of these frames for two frames which is great until you want to put 7.5 in between here so if I rub this out now it's rubbed out on the frame before as well so you can see now it can't you can't put one in there so what you can do is you know you can cut this frame with control X now if I create a new video layer above it at 25 24 this one's gonna be at 24 frames per second and I can say 7 7.5 and now we have you know if your honor if you want to add a couple of ones into a scene this is what I do sometimes and sometimes I copy everything just onto this this layer which I'm going to show you in action how to do that in the next tips and tricks section but I just wanted to make sure that you're aware of this sort of because you may come across it and be baffled about what's happening and the real trouble is that if you see 12 and 24 is quite easy but if you had started in 29.97 which is standard that that becomes like far more difficult to figure out the differences in the time and the frame rate the other thing that I want to show you just quickly is that if you're using video layers and say I've got a layer above it and I've got this like little star and I want to take this I want to cut it and I want to paste it into this video layer just on this frame so I might just switch back to 12 frames per second just for now so we want to stick it on this frame which is 6 I'll press control V and it creates a layer above it which is like that's a pain and the reason that happens is because you've got something already in this frame so if I was to go to frame 1 do that if I was good at it's empty frame where I've deleted 7 and press ctrl-v it place it directly into video layer and if I did we still wanna run this this layer I could press control V it can refer where I want and then press ctrl e to flatten it into this single frame yeah that's just a little quirk I thought I'd save you the time beating a head against the keyboard trying to figure that out yeah I guess anything I can do to remove friction from your life it's gonna help you yeah get engaged in this stuff so hopefully that helps okay so those were the sort of building blocks of how I work combining the layer method and the video layer method now I'm just gonna run you through a few extra tips tricks things that might be updated and cs6 that I think a useful and first thing I'm gonna start with is just creating quick I'm going to create a quick loop of a texture that I've brought in and I'm gonna use the video group method to make to make this leap a little bit quick more quickly so we've got our texture and now we just I'm just going to duplicate this texture because it's quite big I mean I flip it horizontally move it a bit just enter do the same again I'll just duplicate this layer now I'm gonna say now I'll just drag them all onto same timeline don't ya and now I've got a sort of a choppy texture what I want to do now is make this into a video file so I can overlay it on top of my previous animation of the eye so all you need to do is select your layers and duplicate them and it's gonna sequence them for you which is really nice little thing that doesn't happen if you use the regular layer method so now we can quickly make a three second loop okay so we've got this three seconds a video now I'm going to say export render video and I'll make a Photoshop image sequence of PNG sequence you give it a name like sure foil vo one and now I'm gonna create a new subfolder within our normal folder and I'm gonna kill it make sure boil I say you render ok you can see progress now it's a little bit slow because the texture I'm using is really really big even though it's not rendering the whole texture I think it has to load it into memory anyway so I'll speed this up okay that's done now all right now if we go back to eyeball so we've got our eyeball an omission and I want to make a texture on top so this is a brand new feature and cs6 it's um I use it quite a bit so if you go to video layers and you say new video layer from file and now we can just say you know a texture boil select select our first image in the image sequence and now image sequence is ticked and say okay so now it's overlaid on top and it plays back just great I'm gonna make this multiply blending mode and make the opacity if we make it overly maybe Nessa might be to like yes it's kind of nice alright so now we have this little flickery texture of the top which is always nice we can do this in after-effects quite easily but I wanted to use this as an example of building everything within Photoshop the other thing I do quite a lot is to create colorblind layers so this is more of a Photoshop trick than a animation trick but if you click on this check a box here it does a thing called look of transparency transparent pixels so I don't mean when you paint over anything in that you won't it won't affect anything that's transparent so essentially that means you can paint your line color after you've done it in black so we'll do this with this line there so this is how I get a lot of my more I don't know I use this I use this technique if a bit it's quite time-consuming but you know animation is typically pretty time-consuming so I am ok with it the other another thing I use quite a bit is creating clipping masks and applying them to whole groups this is something that came out in cs5 it's incredible none of people know how to use it oh no that exists so to say I had this and I actually wanted it on multiply which means you've got this it's very hard to mask it normally but if you put everything into a group all of your animation all of your lines into a group and say create clipping mask you can actually now clip this to the entire group rather than clipping it to individual layers like it was in previous versions which is really nice and I use that a lot as well yeah and the last thing I want to show you before I wrap up this tutorial because it's pretty long I know it's kind of a lot to take in is just learning to use actions that involve shifting through time a lot of the stuff in animation is really repetitive and you can apply it to lots of frames at the same time so the action I'll show you now is an example of one that involves skipping through time and also repeating an action that you may want to do a lot the example I'm going to show you is how to condense all of your all of your images and all of your layers into one video layer that's nice and clean and easy to use whether that's for cleaning up coloring or animating it can sometimes just simplify your life a little bit alright so firstly I'll make a new video layer with ctrl shift B I'll move it up so it starts at the right time and then I'm gonna change its color I'm gonna make a violet that's red okay red and I'm gonna say all lines okay okay let's say we hadn't filled this yet and we just had our lines mapped out and they're all still on layers and we want to condense them all down into into one video layer first thing we do is to turn off the background so we can just see we can just see the the lines in our group here and then we can get our actions or say new action and we'll say copy to yeah Lia make an f6 okay so it's recording already we say first step is control I just liked everything control shift see so that's going to copy everything from every layer in your scene that's visible and then we'll press control shift V to paste it and that's going to paste it onto the layer that we're on and now this is optional but for the sake of this tutorial I'm going to put it in here go to the next frame you unfortunately can't use the hotkeys for this left and right buttons for some reason that doesn't work so you actually need to click this button here to see you next frame and then you click press stop all right so we've got to do this for a lot of frames now so but if I just press f6 it's gonna keep doing it for everything I can just continuously press f6 and it's gonna go through the other thing I can do is yeah the other thing I can do I'm going to delete this old one I'm gonna delete this old one because this is from my original one just to make sure we're okay so now it should be from the right one the other thing we can do now is we're going to duplicate this on I drag you down to this and then I'm going to select everything in there and duplicate it a bunch of times and this means that you can just batch do things for lots and lots of frames usually I do like 10 at a time okay and now I press play it's gonna go through all these steps over and over and over and over again which is really cool that might not seem totally practical you practical for you right now but hopefully it demonstrates the way to work with time within your actions and also have that you can make variations of the same action quite quickly another variation that I use would be expand fill sometimes you don't want to be you don't have to step back to lay up like you're doing this one so you and you can either say I'll take that one or you can just duplicate it and I'll make I'll make it a three but I'll make it ctrl F 3 and that means so I'll delete these two step back and step forward layer so all it does now is expands it fills it and each likes it so if I it's like this and I press ctrl f3 it's gonna expand fill without needing to go to different layers which yeah it can be really good if you want to keep your some of your fills on the same same as your line layer and I use that for illustration and production art stuff all the time as well it's not necessarily an animation specific tool it's just a nice way to bucket fill your drawings quickly I'm gonna wrap up now because it's toriel's really long and it's a little bit meandering I know and I'm sorry about that but that's that's kind of a good analogy for animating a Photoshop anyway you know it's it's it's kind of a long way around to do things but hopefully hopefully it opens the door for some people that wouldn't usually try animation as well yeah so thanks so much for watching guys I'll try to keep updated with more stuff as it comes to mind and comment below in the BM u link and help help I'll try to help you out and people can help you out as well if they've got answers for questions you might have okay thanks so much for watching guys

Channel: Beche Melisa

Views: 115,335

Keywords: Adobe Photoshop (Software), Adobe Creative Cloud

Id: CCtGQns9O1M

Length: 73min 32sec (4412 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 19 2014