|
|
Over the daily shout thread, I'm amazed with Tom's work on the animation graphics, many asked how it was done, his answered was using GIF extension file. It was mind boggling at first so I surfed the internet to find out more information about this. There are a lot of GIF animators software available, but many is for trial purposes and if one really interested he or she may opt to buy the product.
So how to make a static photo some what appear to be non static? For example, how to make an animal eye in a static photo blink? Or perhaps, how to continuously make lighting level change in a static photo? And off course many more......
To answer those questions, I downloaded one particular software, after figuring it out on how to use it, it run perfectly as per plan but the setback was it put up it's brand name on the finish product. This is something that i really hate! But one thing good is that i learned the basic thing about animation. It utilized GIF extension file, and timed the frame to frame into either single loop and stop or continuous looping. This opened up a new door to me. Yes if we really want a moving picture we might as well as doing some video shooting! But that'll consume too much memory space and i believe nothing really special about it either.
I have Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe ImageReady CS2 on my PC for my photo editing, and frankly the ImageReady was not being use at all! So after having some basic knowledge about animation graphics, I found out that Photoshop itself having that feature, after a lot of times spend on it, I figure out the use of animation button at the top right of the editing screen of the Photoshop, the best thing is one may add up frame by frame from the layers created, and specifically altered individual layers by selecting the specific frame! So the other layers will not be shown on the main display, less interference on editing only that particular layer that we selected.
From there, we may choose the delay timing of playing the individual frame on the main display and after satisfy with the output we may save the file. I've tried to save the file under GIF extension here but when I open it up again using normal photo viewing software, the photo simply does not animate! Same goes when I opened it using Photoshop... mmm... what is wrong? So I opted to save the file under PSD extension, (the normal extension of Photoshop editor) as expected the photo will animate only if opened using Photoshop itself. What next?
Somehow out of curiosity, I opened the file under the PSD extension using ImageReady, and to my surprise, it contained a graphic optimizer, and straight away the animation bar appear at lower screen with the main display showing original, and optimized GIF, 2-up and 4-up. When I clicked 4-up, the main display subdivided into four screens with three showing GIF optimizer and the original one on the first screen. When I clicked play all four started to animate, and one may see some reduction in output quality on the files which was being optimized. I clicked the forth one and save it under GIF extension file.
Yahoooooooooooooooooo.... the photo animated by itself even when I re-open the GIF extension file using ordinary photo viewer software!!!!!!
For those who are interested may check it out on this thread.
|
|