Hopefully you’ve all seen my motion comic and trailer on Sevara’s website. I made these movies in Photoshop using the animation palette, and I learned what Photoshop can and can’t do. My next animation palette grumble for Photoshop CS6 – no ease and wizz that you have in after effects. In the animation below, the robot arm is at a standstill, then starts to move, then stops abruptly.
Ease and wizz would make natural motion automatically. What is ease and wizz? Basically, when doing animations, your objects or layers move from point A to point B. Ease and wizz allows them to move in a more natural and lifelike manner. As of now, Photoshop can move layers, but there are two speeds of motion – moving and not moving. There’s no other way to do it in Photoshop. I can do it manually, adding a new keyframe for every position so that the arm slowly starts then moves faster, then slows down before stopping, but that takes a dozen keyframes and looks unnatural.
The diamond on the left is the keyframe for MOVE. The one on the right is the keyframe for STOP.
That’s it. That’s all we get with Photoshop. STOP and GO. Aftereffects is lucky enough to have ease and wizz, which lets you move your objects in a non-linear motion, meaning that things can gradually start moving or slowly come to a halt. But in Photoshop we can only move objects or fade them in an out in a linear motion.
Not that Photoshop is a stranger to non-linear data. These are called curves, and we Photoshop junkies use them every day. Of course there is the curve layer, below, that is the staple of our photo editing.
Curves adjustment layer
But there are more curves hidden in Photoshop. Many of your layer styles have a contour option, which adds a curve (or non-linear effect) to that style. It has been part of Photoshop for quite some time, even though you might not known it was there.
And if you look at the layer style contours, there are all sorts of presets that you can use, or you can make your own contour and save it as a preset Cool! Photoshop has the mathematical muscle to do contour in pixels, and it can do ease and wizz in After Effects. If I were to add ease and wizz (motion contour) to the Photoshop CS7 animation palette, it might look something like this, with presets and custom contours.
If the Photoshop gods smile upon me, CS7 would have this!
That’s all for me today, join me next time as I look more at the animation palette, and how to make it better.
In the past year, I made three complex animations for my comic book Sevara. You can find them all on the Sevara website, or this YouTube playlist.
Photoshop has some powerful tools, and combined with the animation palette, you can do some pretty cool stuff. Blend modes and masks with animation is quite awesome, to say the least. But…..
For this to be really effective, Photoshop CS7′s animation palette needs to have a few basic things.
First off, curved motion paths. As of right now, layers in photoshop CS6 can be animated in a bunch of fun ways. They can spin, grow, disappear, and even stretch (if you know what buttons to push). But the bottom line is that they can still only move in a straight line from point A to point B. I’m not sure why this would be, particularly since you can draw curves in Photoshop very easily with the pen tool.
What bugs me a thousand time more than the fact that Photoshop CS6 doesn’t have curved motion paths for animation, is that Microsoft Powerpoint DOES! And Powerpoint has had this for years. My Office 2008 can have objects fly in using a number of different curved paths.
As of now, CS6 is severely limited by not having curved motion paths. If you want to make an animated ball bounce around the canvas using CS6, you either have to do it frame by frame like in the old days (using the frame animation option), or add tons and tons of individual start and end points to make the object bounce realistically using the video timeline option. I believe that After Effects, another Adobe product, does have curved motion paths, right? So it can’t be that hard. Here it is on Adobe’s website:
Adobe, if you’re out there, please add curved motion paths to CS7. There’s more to Photoshop animation than just making text fade in and out, as you’ll see on the Sevara website. Then our objects will be able to do all sorts of cool stuff that they can already do in Powerpoint… without blend modes of course.
Join me next time when I go into more animation palette grumbles!
More Mr. Brainwash I watched the documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop over the weekend. This is a must-see film for all artists, as well as an engrossing and outlandish true story that will mesmerize you from start to finish. After seeing the film I ran to my computer to look......
Way of Life - a documentary film The tiny village of Burunkul lies between Khorugh and Murghob in the Pamir region of Tajikistan, forgotten by civilization and clashing empires, bypassed by truckers neglected by time. This meditative study of village of life is about sound and the passage of time, about life cycles and about technology,......
The tiny village of Burunkul lies between Khorugh and Murghob in the Pamir region of Tajikistan, forgotten by civilization and clashing empires, bypassed by truckers neglected by time.
This meditative study of village of life is about sound and the passage of time, about life cycles and about technology, about the ebb and flow of civilizations and those who get lost on the cobwebs of the Silk Road. There is no narration. There are no interviews. There is nothing more that this one morning in the Pamirs.
Shot with a Sony DCR TRV27 on MiniDV. Edited in iMovie ’09. Original score composed in GarageBand.
Stained Glass Mural in Kulyab Kulyab. Tajikistan is planning to build the world’s largest mosque here by 2014 with help from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a presidential spokesman said on Monday. The building, which is to reflect Tajikistan’s traditional architecture, will cover 7.5 hectares (18.5 acres) of area. This image is......
Shadow of Rudaki [/caption] A statue of Rudaki stands in the middle of Rudaki park, near the presidential palace. A statue of Somoni stands not far away. Almost every city in Tajikistan has a massive statue of one of these two figures. Furthermore, almost every city, town and village has a statue of......
Khujand Last Friday, Pei and I were in Khujand...in the news...cide bomber has driven a car packed with explosives into a police office in Khujand, northern Taj...lives were taken, lives were lost...no one knows how many died, but it could have been me on my morning run, it could have......
Khorog A burnt out Russian APC stands watch in Khorog. Russians guarded the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan until 2005. They completed the withdraw, blew up the equipment and left. Now, the fossils remind us of what strength used to be. Like dinosaurs bones, they are a curiosity to children......
