Hi
This waterfall is High Force in Teesdale close to where I live. It's a wonderful place particularly at this time of the year , despite the grey skies. However , I wonder what secrets lie in this gorge.
So the challenge this week is to reveal the secrets of these falls.
I don't know if the "rules" need repeating but , for the benefit of anyone joining us for the first time:
Anything goes as long as it meets the forum rules on decency, copyright etc.
Anyone and everyone is welcome to have a go - whether you are a complete beginner or a Photoshop expert.
There are no prizes apart from the chance to practice, show off, or bring a bit of humour and fun. Don't be shy - come and have a go!
When posting back your edited images please use jpeg and downsize to 1200px on the long side.
To download the image below in jpeg format with ICC color profile (sRGB) and without the forum scaling artefacts , right click and then use Save Image As /Save Target As (or similar depending on your browser).
Have fun.
Dave
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Maybe the deadliest dark blue coldness, unless unlikely friends huddle up and counter it with warmth, if only in a twinkle,
Maybe unknown to most (others than Trevor and me), the unlikely friends met in 2002, when the big one crashed a party of at least five hundred of the little ones, and literally lost it, then was inevitably found out, unable to answer the watchword question "What's the word?" (the answer of course being "Bluebird's the word."), and then eventually (and equally inevitably) getting cornered; after that, the mutiny in the South Sea (where only some were on the gun deck), and now this.
This is my very first live GIF. The actual reworking of the fall and the gorge took less than half a minute, but I struggled with the giffing for quite some hours over several days to get grasp it and get it (more or less) right at long last.
https://forums.adobe.com/people/Jacob+Bugge wrote
This is my very first live GIF. The actual reworking of the fall and the gorge took less than half a minute, but I struggled with the giffing for quite some hours over several days to get grasp it and get it (more or less) right at long last.
In my experience, the whole Photoshop frame animation thing is highly non-intuitive, and there is very little in the way of properly useful guides and tutorials. I've worked it out as I went, and discovered new tips and tricks along the way, but over a fair bit of time. If you have an orange bade, I'd say go learn Animate because it was a proper timeline with parallel assets. With Photoshop you can automate the first moving object to an extent, but additional objects have to manually synced to frames already created. That's why rotating animations work well because you usually only need enough frames to cover one segment, and the previous segment catches up and gives you seamless animation with a fraction of the frames you'd otherwise need.
Tweening is of limited use unless you tween opacity. It also tends to create choppy movement, and you end up using HEAPS of frames to try and counter that, leading to large file sizes, and a total nightmare if you want to sync additional objects to those frames. I don't have an answer for the choppy movement, but motion blur helps. Fast movement looks better than slow movement with the viewer's mind/eye filling in the gaps.
I prefer to create a unique layer for each frame, rather than moving a single layer. Using the one layer can get you into incredible trouble if you get out of sync, and there is no way to fix it other that to start that section from the beginning. Free Transform > Step & Repeat is a big advantage producing layers. If you create those layers in a group, you can Free Transform the group to fine tune position and angles. That is a godsend. Unfortunately Smart Objects don't respond well to Step & Repeat, so you loose quality with each step, so you need to create at a much higher resolution than you intend exporting to.
Keep colours simple and muted so you can reduce colour depth when exporting. Having the colour depth halves the file size. It is still difficult to make the animation more than 800 pixels without making file size too big. I cringe if I have to go about two or three Mb because they take forever to load.
Having frame and layer numbers match helps with syncing multiple objects. If I had to give just one piece of advice, it would be 'make sure you select ALL frames when doing an edit, unless you only want it to affect the selected frame. This is another way to get into trouble.
A workflow I use when syncing a lot of frames to layers:
- Starting from layer one, and frame one selected, turn on layer one.
- Then select layer two (the state the screen shot below is in)
- Advance one frame (Ctrl n — the motion workspace changes a lot of common shortcuts)
- Move eyes back to the Layers panel, and turn on the selected layer.
- Select the next layer... repeat until done
In the example below frame and layers have the same number making the above workflow unnecessary, but if you have 50 frames and the numbers don't match, it can save you some grief.
It's as easy to paste in a video as an image to the Adobe forums, and as the video is streamed as it plays, and the frame animation has to fully download, the bandwidth works better for us, So Animate and After Effects will produce much nicer animations, and with video, you can have sound. I hope to follow my own advice before too very much longer, but even when you think you have some more time on your hands, she who must be obeyed finds new ways to fill it for you. 
Okay, since everyone thinks it’s risky, I will share my inspiration. I was tossing a stack of New Yorker magazines earlier in the day and this one was on top.
IMHO, the New Yorker clothes line is slightly, or more than slightly, riskier than mine! But it reminds me of hanging clothes as a kid before we had dryers and of hanging clothes on a rope with a tautline hitch in the days when I used to backpack. I know there has to be a good camping spot just behind those trees.
And because I know someone will ask why I still had a stack of magazines from spring of 2017, I’ll just say there was a lot going on in my life back then and leave it at that. This stack from 2017 is now in the recycling bin.
And it’s Friday, so on to Part 46 with a new image from Dave!
EDIT: spelled “clothes” correctly. Thanks, Jacob Bugge!
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