Something for the Weekend – Part 264 – ‘Where there’s smoke…’

Classic! 

Chooo Chooo all aboard the Adobe train

Venison stew with a hint of tobacco.  🙃

Nice one ​@daniellei4510 . Wouldn't it look spectacular if it blew smoke each time a pipe was played. 😁

Dave

It reminds me of an F1 steering wheel.  I was going to illustrate what I was talking about, and spent 15 minutes creating buttons and switches before thinking that Gemini would do a better job in a fraction of the time.  I tried three prompts, being more specific each time, that it should not add content outside the original outline, but it ignored it every time.  Oh well.

The way I make frame animations nowadays is to use a video timeline.  You get way more options to move and manipulate objects.  The movement is much smoother with natural ease in and out, and most of all — by a significant margin — it is easier to animate multiple objects.  Anyone who has struggled with syncing a second or third object’s movement to an existing frame animation’s timeline will know what I mean.

Start the video timeline (probably) with a 720P frame size.  Use black bars if the 16:9 aspect ratio doesn’t work. You can crop it later.

Render the video timeline to MP4, and then run it through Handbrake and halve the FPS to 12 or 15FPS depending.

You’ll have a 1280 x 720px 15fps mp4 file that you open back up in Photoshop.

Crop out the black bars or whatever wasted space in the frame.

When done, use the standard File > Export > Save for Web and output to a GIF

The resulting GIF. if still 720 pixels tall is going to be around 12Mb.  That’s OK unless you want to upload to this forum which has a strict 5Mb limit. To get round that reduce the pixel size, and crop out whatever you can get away with, and reduce the color depth when exporting the GIF.  You’ll hardly notice 64 colors, and even 32 colors surprisingly.  Below that it will get muddy.

You can save file size if you start the project with a less busy image.  You can remove backgrounds and have a white background.  You can use Index Color and then set it back to RGB, where it won’t restore lost fine color gradients.  You can go heavy with reduce noise — that’s a big file size saver.  Try making an image super noisy and saving to JPG — the compression has nothing to work on, and the file size will be huge for the pixel size.

I knew it was yours before I read the name at the top, James. I like it.
Dave

Firefly might make the execution easier, but the ideas still have to come. Very clever, Jill.
Dave

I get a .webp file, too, on macOS. I can’t open it in Photoshop directly, so I open it in the Preview app and export to .tiff. I’d love to hear what others do.

Jane