Photoshop® CS5 Bible

Chapter 28. Animating Using the Animation (Frames) Panel

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Getting to know the Animation (Frames) panel

• Tweening in the Animation (Frames) panel

• Creating frame-by-frame animation

Now that you are familiar with how the Animation (Timeline) panel works, I introduce you to the Animation (Frames) panel. The Animation (Frames) panel is very different from the Animation (Timeline) panel; it has a different look and feel and different features to go along with it. The Animation (Timeline) panel is made primarily for you to import video files and color correct, enhance, or create artistic effects with them. The Animation (Frames) panel is meant primarily to be used with the painting and drawing tools to create cartoon animations, primarily animated GIF files for the Web.

An animated GIF is a small animated image or icon that you see almost anywhere on the Web. They are usually simple, such as the animated smiley faces, and operate at an extremely slow frame rate, giving their motion a jerky appearance.

Although Frame animation has most of the capability of Animation (Timeline), you'll find that its strength lies in creating short, crude animations, such as animated GIFs. Being able to see each frame without dragging the current time indicator around is very handy. Frame animation can get very unwieldy in a very few frames, however, as you'll see when you begin to create animations in this chapter.

Some of the other advantages of frame animation are being able to reverse frames or ...