Over the daily shout thread, I’m amazed by Tom’s work on the animation graphics, Many asked how it was done, and his answer was using a GIF extension file. It was mind-boggling at first so I surfed the internet to find out more information about this. There are a lot of GIF animator software available, but many are for trial purposes, and if one is interested he or she may opt to buy the product.
So how to make a static photo somewhat appear to be non-static? For example, how to make an animal eye in a static photo blink? Or perhaps, how to continuously make lighting level change in a static photo? And of course many more……
To answer those questions, I downloaded one particular software, and after figuring out how to use it, it ran perfectly as per plan but the setback was it put up its brand name on the finished product. This is something that I hate! But one thing good is that I learned the basic things about animation. It utilized a GIF extension file and timed the frame to frame into either a single loop and stop or continuous looping. This opened up a new door for me. Yes if we want a moving picture we might as well do some video shooting! But that’ll consume too much memory space and I believe nothing really special about it either.
I have Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe ImageReady CS2 on my PC for my photo editing, and frankly, the ImageReady was not being used at all! So after having some basic knowledge about animation graphics, I found out that Photoshop itself has that feature, After a lot of time spent on it, I figured out the use of the animation button at the top right of the editing screen of Photoshop, the best thing is one may add up frame by frame from the layers created, and specifically altered individual layers by selecting the specific frame! So the other layers will not be shown on the main display, with less interference on editing only that particular layer that we selected.
From there, we may choose the delay timing of playing the individual frame on the main display, and after we are satisfied with the output we may save the file. I’ve tried to save the file under the GIF extension here but when I open it up again using normal photo viewing software, the photo simply does not animate! The same goes when I opened it using Photoshop… mmm… what is wrong? So I opted to save the file under PSD extension, (the normal extension of Photoshop editor) as expected the photo will animate only if opened using Photoshop itself. What next?
Somehow out of curiosity, I opened the file under the PSD extension using ImageReady, and to my surprise, it contained a graphic optimizer, and straight away The animation bar appeared on the lower screen with the main display showing the original, and optimized GIF, 2-up, and 4-up. When I clicked 4-up, the main display subdivided into four screens with three showing GIF optimizer and the original one on the first screen. When I clicked play all four started to animate, and one may see some reduction in output quality on the files which was being optimized. I clicked the fourth one and saved it under the GIF extension file.
Yahoooooooooooooooooo…. the photo animated by itself even when I re-open the GIF extension file using ordinary photo viewer software!!!!!!