Adobe Animation

I have been checking some of the feature changes between Adobe Photoshop CS3 and CS4 with particular attention to the animation capabilities and performance. In CS3, for example, I have found that a number of Photoshop editing commands are applied to all of the frames and that you have to think differently from Flash and other animation tools to effectively create animations in Photoshop.

Here is the basics. There is a small subset of things you can do to any one animation frame that won’t be immediately copied to every frame in your animation. These frame specific edits are Move, most of the Filter Gallery commands but not the Image | Adjustments. In fact, all of the Toolbox brushes and effects, Image Color adjustments, plus image transformations are always propagated across the frames in an animation. Yep – even with CS4’s Propagate from 1st Frame check box turned off , these edits are copied to every frame.

So the trick is to have the animation pre-drawn out in layers. A layer showing for example, a rocket’s exhaust on blast off would be just one of many layers stacked on a Rocket Launch animation image. Then you duplicate the image from frame to frame turning layers on and off to make the animation “work”. Photoshop provides a tweening icon that will allow users to change the appearance of a feature automatically generating the frames as required(see the second reference below).

Here are the important points to note:
1)The Adobe documentation of how these animation features work is quite spare – you will have to go to other websites to get the goods. Here are three which provide excellent starter documentation and ideas:
Creative Tech – some great tips here on animations.
You Tube Demo – shows how to stack layers and then create animation using tweens, also how to export to SWF
MyJanee – Again the lesson is how to stack up the frames into layers and then turn them off and on.
2)The new features in Photoshop CS4 are added audio and export capabilities. PS/CS4 does not add to the one-frame only edit features.
3)the docs are even worse on the early download edition – huge 2.7GB, and the basic Help file is missing details everywhere including Animations.

For those wanting to create simple GIF Animations here is a bit of info you won’t easily find in Photoshop’s Help files- only one command, File | Save for Web & Devices will work . By the way, do you get the impression that the people at O’Reilly and PeachPit Press love the new Missing Manual opportunities being created by Adobe’s scattered and/or poor documentation? Animations is a prime example, this is very useful capability being locked up by poor docs.