Advantages of Animation in Photoshop

When people think of Adobe Photoshop, they generally think about photo editing, retouching and cool graphics effects. But Photoshop has many other uses as well. One of these is in the creation of simple animations. These animations can used in commercials or as animated graphics and ads for web pages. There are several advantages to using the current version of Photoshop for producing your animation.

While previous versions of Photoshop came with a companion program (ImageReady) for creating animations from Photoshop images, this functionality is now folded into Photoshop itself, which speeds up the process greatly. The Animation function is found under the "Windows" in the menu. When open, it reveals a timeline at the bottom of the screen and simple set of icons and a drop-down menu for controlling aspects of the animation. You can click on "Make Frames From Layers" to turn the layers in the file directly into animation, or you can create duplicate frames and move objects against the background layer.

A huge advantage found in using Photoshop when creating animation is the array of tools and abilities to program provides you with. You can easily add an adjustment layer over the whole animation or just a section of it and applies filters, adjustments and other changes to the frames. Or you can paint in effects (like lightning, for example) frame by frame.

Yet another advantage to creating animation in Photoshop is that if you already own copy, you are likely already familiar with the general layout and controls. For example, if you need resize the image in the timeline, you will probably already know how to do that from working with more conventional images. If you were creating the animation in another program, you would have to learn the functions all over again (even assuming they could be done in the other program).