Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual

Flipbooks

In some ways, a flipbook is like a very simple slideshow without any transitions, audio, or fancy panning and zooming. After slogging through the last section, you may be thinking you've had enough slideshow options in Elements, thank you very much. But all that's different about a flipbook is the speed at which the images appear. A flipbook's frame rate (how fast one image appears and disappears) is very fast. When you put a stack of photos you took with your camera in burst mode into a flipbook, you can create an animation where the images change so fast it appears that your subject is moving.

Tip

Flipbooks are great for creating a time-lapse effect. For instance, if you take a photo of the building progress of your new house each day from the exact same spot, you can combine all the photos and watch your house go from an empty lot to finished in just a few seconds.

The flipbook effect is similar to an animated GIF, but you can use JPEGs in your flipbook, so the image quality is much higher than with a GIF (see Saving Images for the Web or Email for more about GIFs). The downside is that you can't easily embed a flipbook as an animated object in a Web page. Your completed flipbook is a Windows Media file, so all you can do is watch it like a movie or regular slideshow. That said, Elements does give you several different output sizes, so you can pick one that's suitable for watching on a regular television (although you'll need Adobe's Premiere Elements or some other video ...