Photoshop® CS5 Bible

Chapter 26. Animating in the Animation (Timeline) Panel

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Setting and editing keyframes

• Animating layer properties

• Rotoscoping

• Animating DICOM images

Animation and keyframes are a big part of how the Animation (Timeline) panel works and the effects you can create with your video files. Before I show you how to perform basic color correcting and image effects on your video files, I show you how to use the keyframes in the Animation (Timeline) panel to change your effects over time.

Just as you've always known since you were a kid, video and animation are 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. A standard frame rate to create realistic motion is 30 frames per second. 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 animation. Now I've watched enough special features titled "The Making of..." to have a pretty good notion that animators even in the days before computers had many tips and tricks up their sleeves to make the animating process smooth and efficient

Animating in Photoshop not only employs many of the tips and tricks of efficient animating, it also can automate some of the most tedious tasks. We've all seen clay animation productions—the animations created by moving clay figures a miniscule amount and taking a picture and then repeating the process until all the pictures put together create ...