Photoshop® CS3 Extended Video and 3D Bible

Chapter 9. Animating Using Keyframes in the Timeline

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating and editing keyframes

• Animating the position of a layer

• Animating the Opacity setting

• Animating using layer styles

• Animating the global lighting

• Animating text

As you've known since you were a kid, video and animation is produced by creating a series of images and showing them at such a high speed that it fools our brains into thinking that we are watching true motion. When I was a kid, I always wondered who had to draw and color the millions of pictures it took to make a full-length animated movie. Now I've watched enough special features entitled "The Making of..." to have a pretty good notion that some of those frames did not have to be created in their entirety, but many tips and tricks made the animation more efficient.

When you animate in Photoshop, you can also use many tips and tricks to animate more efficiently, as well as automate some of the most tedious tasks. We've all seen claymation productions — the animations that are created by moving clay figures a miniscule amount and taking a picture, and then repeating the process until all of the pictures are put together to create a movie. I'll tell you now that some of the animation in Photoshop is going to be just like that frame-by-frame animation. Not all of it, though, and that's where keyframes come into play.

A keyframe is one of the essential components of animating in Photoshop. A keyframe allows you skip many of the tedious steps in between "key" ...