Lessons

Lesson Info

Animated Gifs

I'm gonna open up this image here which has layers in it that we're gonna use to make our animated GIF. So if I just double-click this and open it up in Photoshop, I've got my frame animation right here. Now, because this is a layer that has transparency in it, I don't want that to become one of my frames in my image, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna press Control+Shift+Alt and E, and then if I delete this layer here, that's essentially just a layer stamp for all the stuff that I did with both of those two layers combined. So if you can imagine using this in your workflow as a photographer, this is something that maybe you wanna show the before and after of something in a video in your timeline, so that as people are going through your Facebook page or something like that, they see a before and after. And it's basically just a finished flattened layer on top of your beginning work that would alter back and forth, on and off. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select both of these. I'm ...

gonna select Create Frame Animation, and then after I've created the frame animation, I'm gonna click on this little hamburger icon right here, and then I'm gonna say Make Frames From Layers. So now, you see there's two different layers here inside our frame animation. This is basically identifying. If we had a video that was 24 frames a second, we get to identify how long each one of these frames actually is. Now, if we change this down here to .1 seconds, it's gonna be very fast, so what you want to gather attention is probably one second per. And then, you get to decide how much do you want this to loop. Do you want it to loop once? Do you want it to loop three times? Or do you want it to loop forever? We're gonna say loop forever because that's what animated GIFs do. They go on and on and on. And we'll just go ahead and press play, and now they're going for one second per, which might be a little bit too long, so we'll just press stop. We'll highlight both of these. We'll drop this down to .5 seconds, and then press play. A little bit faster, so now it's oh, wait. They're there. They're gone. They're there. They're gone. They're there. They're gone. They're there. They're gone. Now, in order to export this, we need to export it out as a GIF, so what we're gonna do for that is we're gonna use a legacy version of exporting for web. We're gonna press Control+Shift+Alt and S, or Command+Shift+Option and S. This is one of the fastest ways to get into the save for web feature. I don't even know if they even have save for web in here anymore underneath the file. It might be called something different. But the save for web feature gives you the ability to turn this into an animated GIF. This is the only way you're really gonna be able to save it as an animated GIF, so make sure you're going in through this save for web feature. If I look at what it's asking me here is that it's a GIF. It's definitely not gonna be a JPEG. If it was a JPEG, it's just gonna be one layer, so it's a GIF. Then, we get to select whether it's perceptual, selective, or basically the settings of what's gonna happen as the GIF plays. I would tend to just keep this probably with the settings that it says right here. There's many things that you can go into. I did a whole video tutorial on this where I broke down every one of these different things, and really what it comes down to is whatever Photoshop kind of opens up with, just go ahead and go with it. If you change these settings, it's not gonna really work out for you. So have this just set to the regular GIF for save for web. And then once you press save, depending on where you save this to ... Let's go ahead and save this into the same folder that we've been using under Editing Video, Animated GIF, and we'll save it in there. Now, if we open up that animated GIF, it's gonna open up in Photoshop as an animated GIF, but if we were to open that just as a regular Windows Viewer, just right-click and open it up into another type of viewer, you'd see it as an animated GIF. If we were to upload it to a website, it would upload and it would have the animated GIF kind of feature going on with it. Typically with animated GIFS, you wanna host those on your own website and then use the link for that and put that onto something like Facebook rather than just uploading it directly to Facebook, 'cause it's not gonna interact the same way. So keep those things in mind. There's other types of websites that you can upload them to, other GIF websites that you can upload them to, and they will do that hosting for you so that you can use those over on your social media platforms. So editing video is nothing more than editing a series of still images that are all put together. We can still use adjustment layers. We can still use regular layers. In this, we talked about using layers, using adjustment layers, making your own color lookup tables that we could use over and over again on either videos or photos if we wanted to, for that matter. We talked about adding text to videos, and we had talked about using the stopwatch on those to increase and decrease opacities and move the transform on there. And then, we talked about the animated GIF, and typically, where I use the animated GIF is really gonna be with showcasing the before and after of an image like I did with this one. I show what happened with all the cars there, and I show what happened when all the cars disappeared, and that's something that I actually did use on my Facebook page. If you scroll through there, probably be something from a couple months ago. So before we move on, do we have any questions on editing video? Audio, I noticed audio wasn't brought up on editing video. Yes, you can edit audio in there, too. The bottom of any of your videos that you have in Photoshop ... I closed them out, but at the bottom of any of your videos you have in Photoshop, there is a part there that says add audio, so you'd bring in your audio into there just like you would into a layer or load it right into there, and from there you would cut it off at the ends and fade it in and fade it out to add audio to it, but it's the exact same thing that you would do in other video editing software. One more question real quick was you had the text up there. It'd be really cool to see the video going behind the text. Oh, yeah. So what you would do in that case, if you wanted the video to go behind the text, you would just put the text on top of the video area or just remove that intermediate area, and then that text would be there doing whatever it's doing on top of the video. So you don't have to have the text on a-- The text looked like a window, and the fish were going behind the text. You could read it. Then, all of a sudden ... Right, you could do that, too. What you could do with that is you could take the video, put the video on top of the text, and clip the video into the text with a clipping mask, and then the video would steal the properties of the text. Just like we did with the window. Just like we did with the window there, exactly, but you would take the video and clip the video into the text. I just wanted to know, is there any limit in the size of the videos you can edit and play with in Photoshop? The limit that I would say to edit in Photoshop is whatever your computer can handle, 'cause video rendering is a very patient process, and it's very heavy on the graphics, so would I edit a three-hour video in here? Probably not. But when I do my videos, my couch videos can be anywhere from five minutes to 20 minutes long, and I'll still render them in there, but if I'm rendering a 20-minute video, it takes a while. I basically set it to render, and because I'm a workflow creep, I have two computers and I just turn the one on next to me and I start working on the other one. So yeah, it's gonna tie your computer down, so the bigger the video that you're using when it comes to rendering it and outputting it, that's where you're gonna see the problems. It's really not gonna be in the problems of actually building the video. It's more gonna be in okay, I've got the video. I've got it set. Now, I'm gonna render it. Some of these might take you 45 minutes to an hour, so just go grab a cup of coffee and some lunch and maybe run some errands, and it might be done when you get home depending on the computer that you have. Do you have a question? Yes. Kind of the reverse of pulling out an individual image. Can you take a series of stills and turn it into a video versus an animated GIF? Absolutely. So what we did with the frame animation there with the animated GIF is if you had a series of frames, a series of layers I should say, that were stacked on top of each other, when you create that frame animation, it's gonna create the frame animation from all the layers that were there. So what you'd do is, to set yourself up, you'd set all your layers up into a stack. I believe there's even a script for that in Photoshop where you can open up the layers as a stack. Open up those layers as a stack, and then once you open your video timeline, create the frame animation. Then, you get to dictate how long those clips are, so if they're .1 second, then you could essentially get 10 frames per second or go even faster, so you could make a video from a series of stills, and then you would export it out as an MP4, not an animated GIF. So that would be like stop-motion movies. Yeah, exactly like a stop-motion movie. Yeah. Yes. So when you pull in a still image that you wanna animate in some way, how do you get the video timeline back up there, 'cause it wouldn't pop up automatically-- No. Like if you pulled a video in. So if you go to Window, right here go to Timeline. That'll turn it on. That'll turn on. And that'll turn it off. And that timeline, it's not just attaching itself to a video. You can use that video timeline for just about anything. Okay. And then, one other question. So if you're working on just a portion of your video in Photoshop, like the credits or something like that, and then you wanted to open it in Premiere Pro or something like that, could you save that to your Adobe library so you don't have to export it and then re-upload it in the other software? That's a good question. I don't know because I don't know Premiere, but you could save it as a PSD file, and if Premiere could open a PSD file, then it would be able to open it without rendering it, but things might be a little bit different there, 'cause I don't know how they handle layers. I don't know how they handle adjustment layers, so you might be better off just rendering out that video in the highest quality possible, then pulling that high-quality video and pulling it into Premiere. That's something I'm a little iffy on 'cause I don't use Premiere. Photoshop was a big enough learning curve for me. (audience chuckling) If you wanted to vignette your video, it would be just like you'd vignette your regular photo? That's a great question. If you wanted to put a vignette on a video, the best way to do that would be either to use a black layer that you make a mask for or to use an adjustment layer, but don't use Adobe Camera RAW for that, 'cause it would take 15 hours (laughing) to export that out, so just use basically a black layer that you'd put on top of that video timeline that you spread out, and then use a mask, and then hit that mask to make that vignette appear, kind of like we've done may times before throughout the course already. Good question, 'cause I do use vignettes a lot. Another thing, vignettes can be exported out as a PNG file and used in other software, so I use vignettes in another piece of software when I'm doing video stuff that I just put in as a transparent layer, so you can do that, too.