Technical question

[emmagrant01]

I want to make a animated icon, and I have no idea how. You know, one of those "slide show" ones that flashes three or four images? I have Adobe PhotoShop, Picture It (Microsoft), and Photosuite.

Can anyone give me instructions as to how to proceed? I'm fairly computer-savvy...

Comments

[thalia]

If you have Photoshop 6 or 7, you also have ImageReady. (I don't know about earlier versions.) That's what you use to make animated icons. My suggestion is to get into ImageReady and play around with it--I'm trying to think of an easy way to explain how it works, but I can't think what to say. Then again, I'm hardly an expert. You might want to talk to sithdragn, who's a Photoshop wiz. And if you get into Photoshop help, there should be something under animation.

Good luck! If you have any questions, I'll be happy to try to help, but no promises.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

Thanks! *squee*

[thalia]

Ooh, nice!

[jamie]

Lemme see if I can do this.

1. Make sure all the pictures you want to use to flip between are the same size for an icon and have them all open in photoshop.

2. Launch image ready.

3. Pick one of your images in photoshop, ideally the one you want to show first, do a select all, copy.

4. Go to image ready and file, new, paste. Now you have the first layer.

5. Back to photoshop, second image, select all, copy. Paste into image ready in the existing file. It should now be the second layer.

6. Repeat until you have them all. Keep in mind that they're going to have to be fairly low quality images since your total can't be over 40K.

(starting a new comment)

[jamie]

In image ready there is a really good help file that explains all of this better than I am. No promises I'm not missing a step here /grin/.

7. Down at the bottom of the image ready screen is an animation tool bar thing. As you mouse over there is one that says new frame. Click it. You'll see it's the same as the one that was already there. This is because the top layer is the one that is visible so -

Go over to the layers palette now and click on the eyeball that makes each layer visible and make each layer invisible EXCEPT the one you want to see for the second frame.

8. Repeat the new frame and the layer visibilty clicking until you have the sequence you want.

9. Set the interval on each frame in the animation palette that you want and press play to watch it run. :)

10. I believe it is export to save it out as a gif.

That should do it.

The help file also explains how to create a blend where it transitions from one image to the next instead of the 'flashing over' effect but with the 40k size limit on lj I haven't found it really worth it.

Hope this helps

[thalia]

Yay Lori! I couldn't figure out how to explain all that, but you did great.

10. I believe it is export to save it out as a gif.

I think it's "save optimized," or something like that.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

Testing...

And thanks for the super-clear directions! That was pretty easy!