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Character Animation in Adobe Photoshop

Learn character animation in adobe Photoshop. In this lecture you will learn how you can create animation in adobe Photoshop. We can create GIF animation with a few easy steps in Adobe Photoshop and you can use that animation on various platforms.

Basic steps for animation

Try to keep your character or object as vector for better graphic quality. In any vector tool like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw just keep your character or object as sprites. You can also create an environment for you animation as you can see in above video we have created a green park environment for our character. If you don’t want to create environment then just create a new file in Photoshop and you can use reasonable canvas size according to your requirement. We have used 1366px by 768px size for our canvas.

Let’s start animation

Next step is just copy all of your sprite images one by one from your Illustrator/Corel draw to Photoshop. But the very most important point is the dimension and position of all characters should be same. You can set “x” and “y” positions with grids so that when your animation is playing there should be no jerk at all.

Now simply just open your timeline from window menu. Select “Create Frame Animation” if this option is not selected. At this stage it depends on you that you can create as much frames as you want. on frame one only first character or object layer should be visible rest layers should be hide. Similary you can do with all frames, at each frame you just need to keep visible only relevant layers other layers should be hide. When all frames done one by one then you can play your animation. There is small drop down icon under each frame from there you can set speed of animation/video. You can also set its loop time, either it should run for once, twice or forever.

Save your animation

To save your animation just go into file menu, click option “Save for web”. A new window will open, from top right corner you can select option GIF from the drop down, colors option should be selected 256 and click on Save button and save it at your required destination.
Now go into your destination folder and drag your GIF file in any browser it will be working perfectly.

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How to use Smart Object in Photoshop CC Tutorial. Smart Object Benefits.

Our today topic is how to use smart object and smart object benefits. There are two major parts of this tutorial, first one is “what is Smart Object” and second part is “Why should we use smart object”. Let’s discuss about both parts of Smart Object one by one.

What is Smart Object?

Smart Object is group of layers that contain multiple data of text and images. In Adobe Illustrator we do not convert art work into Smart Object because it remains vectored at all stages. But when we copy our art work from Adobe Illustrator to Adobe Photoshop then we have an option to keep our design as Smart Object.

Also when we are working in Adobe Photoshop and we have multiple layers, we can covert all or a few layers into Smart Object. For example if you are designing a website and there are multiple sections of landing page like header, hero, services, footer etc, you can select all layers of hero and press right click of your mouse then select “Convert into Smart Object” option. You will notice that all selected layers are removed from layer panel and only one layer is visible with name of smart object, you can rename it and keep some relevant name. Now all of your layers are saved in this one layer and you can edit them anytime by double clicking on this layer. When you will double click on this all layers will be visible and you can make changes in this file, save it and close file, you change will be done and occur in your original landing PSD.

Why should we use smart object

The main reason to use Smart object is re-usability. Let’s discuss again above mentioned example of landing page, if you have multiple page of your website and there are a few common module in all pages. Whenever any new changes come from client you have to change in all of your psd. It will be very easy for you if you converted all common modules into Smart Object. What you need to do it just convert your header into smart object and save as that Smart Object file as .PSB format and close it. Now in your About, Service and contact pages wherever you are using similar header just use this “Header.PSB” file or in about.psd file select your header files convert them into smart object, press right button of your mouse and click “Replace Contents” option, now you can re-link your Header.PSB file. Now whenever you will make change in your Header.PSB that change will be done in all your psd files you just need to “Replace Content”.

Smart Object Benefits

  • Once you converted your image into Smart Object then you can resize, scale, rotate, skew, distort, perspective transform, or warp your image without losing original resolution and quality.
  • The most important benefit is re-usability of Smart Object as mentioned above.
  • Art work can be copied as Smart Object from Adobe Illustrator to Photoshop and can be edit anytime.
  • Make changes in your Smart Object and automatically update all its linked files.

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