The production methods we have learned so far are sufficient to meet most flat animation production needs. In this lesson we will learn some techniques that can add more effects to animation works, including: special layers, acceleration and deceleration, motion blur, and text deformation . I also hope that everyone can summarize their own production skills and share them with others.
These skills are based on previous courses. Therefore, it is necessary to thoroughly master all previous courses.
Items that can be animated in Photoshop include layer position, layer mask, layer opacity, and layer style. In the basic tutorial stage we learned about color adjustment layers and fill layers. This type of layer is special. The former does not directly generate an image, but makes color adjustments to the underlying layer. Although the latter produces an image, it is a "virtual pixel" and the filled content can be changed later. Now let's use them for animation and see what kind of effect we can get. Click here to read about color adjustment layers. Click here to read about fill layers.
The color adjustment layer is relatively easy to use, and you can use it to create color changing effects. These effects can range from light and dark changes, grayscale changes, inversion, etc. The implementation method is also very simple, that is, first create a color adjustment layer and make relevant settings, and then animate the opacity of the adjustment layer. The animation examples below are curve darkening, curve brightening, gradient mapping, and inversion. To change an image to grayscale, you can use a gradient map's grayscale gradient, or use hue-saturation.
It should be noted that this kind of color change animation takes up a large number of bytes because the pixels between the previous and next frames are mostly different. This should be balanced by reducing the number of frames, frame rate, or size of the animation as much as possible. In addition, you can also create a mask of the adjustment layer to achieve color adjustment effects only for a certain area, which will not be demonstrated here.
Sometimes it may be necessary to show some dramatic changes. The so-called drastic changes are either large movements of pixels or large changes in color. Inversion can be used to achieve drastic changes in color. Through the previous example, we found that the effect of using inversion as a transition is not good. Turning off the transition effect can cause drastic color changes. This can be achieved in two ways, one is to set the frame to preserve interpolation. The second is not to leave a gap between the two key frames, so it doesn't matter whether there is a transition or not.
It should be noted that the second method is less modifiable later. If you increase the frame rate in the document settings, a new frame will be inserted between the two original closely spaced keyframes, so a transition effect will occur. Therefore this method is not recommended. Instead, take the first approach.
Now everyone can make this animation by themselves. The file package contains material pictures and PSD of the finished product. Please do not open the PSD file yet and try to analyze and create it yourself. After completion, refer to the sample PSD file.
This sample animation demonstrating the technique of using an Invert adjustment layer has a certain plot. The first is a black meteor falling. The meteor is a straight or vertical line drawn with a brush with a fade step, then rotated to 45 degrees (the angle can be customized), and then the part of the sky except the building is created as Mask. After unlinking the mask, the meteor can be moved independently and create an occlusion effect with the building. The subsequent reverse-phase alternation has no technical difficulties and will not be explained again. As for the creation of masks, please refer to the relevant content about layer masks in the basic tutorial.
It should be noted that the final fade out uses a hue and saturation adjustment layer. The difference is that the fade out to black is used instead of the previous fade out to white. When using adjustment layers to create fadeouts, it's best not to use Curves or Luminance Contrast, as these two color adjustment commands don't exactly turn the image into full white or black, as the Hue Saturation command does.
In addition to using adjustment layers, you can also use fill layers , or fill ordinary layers to create fadeouts. The principle of fade out is the process of gradually increasing the opacity of the layer from 0% to 100%. The advantage of this is that in addition to black and white, it can also fade out to other colors such as red, blue, etc. The following is an animation produced in 2000. The personal photo at that time was cut into two different areas, and then divided into three segments. A white fill layer was used to create a simulated exposure transition effect. Because it is used as a personal avatar in the classic forum, the size and number of bytes of the animation are strictly limited.
It is not an easy task to keep the number of bytes as small as possible while ensuring the smoothness of the animation as much as possible. This may require sacrificing some even good ideas. But if the animation produced does not meet the requirements, or the transmission is slow, it will lose its most important value. You can use other materials to imitate this animation, and the file size is limited to about 5K (example is 3.65K). And try to add some new ideas of your own under this premise. As for the monochrome and silk thread effects.
In the fill layer, in addition to the commonly used solid color fills, there are also pattern fills and gradient fills. There will be no additional instructions on how to use them. You can just try them yourself.
We learned how to make a moving object a long time ago, but the objects we made all moved at a constant speed. Now we can simulate the effects of acceleration and deceleration by changing the position of the keyframes. This effect is not limited to the movement of objects, but can also be used in any transitional effect such as fade in and fade out. And this method is also applicable to other video editing software, as well as the timeline DHTML effect of the web page production software GoLive.
First, we create a new 150×100 white background image and set the document to 1 second and 30fps. Create a new normal layer, draw a rectangle, and set the animation to move it from the left to the right. The timeline setting is roughly as shown in the figure below. The current movement speed is constant.
Next, move the time benchmark to 10f, click the diamond button of the "Position" item, and manually add a keyframe at the current moment. This keyframe is currently redundant as it does not change the animation process. Now let's imagine that if you originally planned to arrive at a place in 10 minutes, but now you are required to arrive in 5 minutes, then you definitely need to speed up. Once you understand this principle, you can understand the method of making accelerated animation. That is to move the key frame at time 10f to time 05f. In this way, the object will move quickly between 0f and 05f, and return to its original speed after 05f.
By analogy, move 15f to 10f, 20f to 15f, and 25f to 20f. You can create an object that slows down. We are here to illustrate the effect, but in actual production there is actually no need to change so many keyframes. Depending on the distance the object moves, changing 2 to 3 keyframes is generally enough. Moving distances that are too long are not suitable for GIF representation. Also, don’t set the frame rate as high as 30fps.
Motion blur is actually related to the movement of objects. Sometimes when it is necessary to use fewer frames to express the rapid movement of objects, using motion blur can reduce the jumping feeling of the picture. In the following example animation demonstration, the number of frames provided for character movement is 4 frames. It is very cramped to complete long-distance movement (the so-called long distance also needs to refer to the size of the object) under such a limited number of frames. To make up for this shortcoming, we duplicate the character layer and process it with a motion blur filter to create an afterimage effect. Move the afterimage with the character layer and hide it at the beginning and end of the movement. This character graphic can be found in the shape library that comes with Photoshop. Everyone tries to create the motion blur effect themselves. We provide PSD source files for everyone to compare after completion.
It should be noted that here we still retain the complete image of the character in the frame with motion blur. In actual operation, we can also reduce the opacity of the character, or simply retain only the afterimage, resulting in a faster sense of movement. In the mode of retaining only the afterimage, the length of the afterimage should be appropriately extended and should be close to the position of the object at the end of the movement. You can watch the sample animation carefully and pay attention to the difference in the position of the afterimage.
Motion blur is widely used in the field of film and television production, and most film and television production software such as After Effects have special functions for this. In some film and television clips, if you pause some fast-moving objects, you can see similar afterimages. The English name of motion blur is Motion Blur. In GIF animation production, motion blur may increase the number of colors in the animation, because the afterimage effect itself contains many transitional colors. When outputting, pay attention to a balance between the number of colors and animation quality.
In addition to using filters to create afterimages, you can also copy multiple copies of the layer and change its color or opacity successively to form a more regular afterimage effect. As shown in the right picture below, you can copy the character layer into 3 copies and fill them with them. The color changes to varying degrees of gray. This kind of afterimage can also be expressed well with a smaller number of colors. The afterimage formed by the filter may produce color spots at a smaller number of colors.
When using text layers, some attentive readers may have discovered the " text deformation " animation project. As shown in the figure below, you can set the deformation style to "None" or other styles in the animation to create a transitional deformation effect. This animation project is actually very easy to use, but unfortunately it can only be limited to text. It would be better if it could be effective for all graphics. However, we can sometimes simulate some simple object shapes through punctuation or special characters in text, thereby gaining the ability to deform. For example, the symbol "-" can be expanded into a rectangle.
