This tutorial will teach you how to animate using Adobe Photoshop CS3. Its not a hard thing to do once you know how and that is what this tutorial aims to teach you. Remember this tutorial is for Adobe Photoshop CS3, if you want tutorials for other software please check the tutorials section of the site.

OK so lets go, first thing you need to know about animation is that if you want to make something that has 10 movements in it you need to have 10 seperate images, one for each movement. You can add what ever effects you like to these images as long as you have software to do it

Once you have that sorted you get all your images together and drag all of them into Photoshop. For this tutorial i will be making an animation that spells the word “DUMBER” letter by letter then changes colour. Here are the images I created for this animation after I dragged them all into Photoshop:

You will need these images so you can do this animation as you read the tutorial. You can DOWNLOAD THESE IMAGES HERE

Now here is what you should end up with after this tutorial:

All I did to create these was made simple text and changed the colour of it and resaved it with a different name, then by the time im finished i had 7 different images. OK so lets start this, first of all you need to unzip the images folder you just downloaded. To do this just right click on it and click “Extract All…”:

Once thats done you drag all them images into Photoshop. Then up the top, where the menu is you click on “Window” and make sure that there is a tick mark on “Animation”:

if not then click on it and an animation panel will show up at the bottom of Photoshop as shown below:

Next you need to make sure that the first image is on RGB colour mode and not indexed colour, you can check this by clicking on “Image > Mode > RGB colour”:

The first image would be this one:

This is the main image in this tutorial and when you are finished this is the one that will be animated. Lets start the animation process now. Click on the first image and then go to the animation panel and you will have one frame, on this you need to set how long the frame shows for, 0.2 seconds will do in this case and you can set it by clicking on the downwards arrow on the frame and selecting 0.2seconds from the options. I have highlighted the arrow for you in RED below:

By doing this you have now set all the future frames to 0.2 seconds in this animation . You may have also noticed a GREEN marking which is used for adding new frames, and the ORANGE marked area is the rubbish bin, use this if you accidently create too many frames. Ok so by clicking on the green marking go ahead and make 6 new frames so that we have 7 frames in total. Next you need to go to image 2 which would be this one:

Then press Ctrl & A to select all. Now go back to the first image and select frame 2 from the animation panel at the bottom, then press Ctrl & V to paste what you have just copied. This should update ALL frames with this image, this is normal. Now go to image 3 which is this one

and copy everything from that same as you did the last one Ctrl & A and then back to the main image and select frame 3 then press Ctrl & V to paste what you have copied. Do this for all the images and remember to move to the next frame before pasting each image.

Ok if you have done that you should end up with 7 frames that look like this:

And to the right you should have “layers”, 7 of them:

There is one layer for each frame, for example, layer 0 belongs to frame 1 and layer 1 belongs to frame 2 and so on, all you need to do is make sure that you turn off all layers that are not needed in each frame. You can turn off layers by clicking on the eye that is before each one:

So to break it down here is what you should have at the same time:
Frame 1 – Layer 0
Frame 2 – Layer 1
Frame 3 – Layer 2
Frame 4 – Layer 3
Frame 5 – Layer 4
Frame 6 – Layer 5
Frame 7 – Layer 6

Once you have done that and it all looks as it should then press play:

Just under frame one is a box that says either “once” or “forever” this is to control how much your animations plays or for how long, if you pick once then the animation will play once and stop at the last frame forever, but if you pick forever then it will play forever and never stop. You can also choose “custom” which allows you to put in the number of times you want it to play. If you want to play the animation 20 times then stop just type in 20 and thats it:).

Your animation should play now just go to file/ Save for web and devices and make sure you save it as a .GIF file, otherwise it wont animate