Something for the weekend - Part 45 - Secret of the falls

a little risque

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:

1. Starting from layer one, and frame one selected, turn on layer one.
2. Then select layer two (the state the screen shot below is in)
3. Advance one frame (Ctrl n — the motion workspace changes a lot of common shortcuts)
4. Move eyes back to the Layers panel, and turn on the selected layer.
5. 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. 

ScooterD76  wrote LOL, davescm It's a basket for disc golf

Well you learn something new every day.  It looks a bit physical, but I love how the disks fly.  Much straighter and flatter than a Frisbee.

Hi

Jerry - I like the way he is peeping through the water. The ring should fall into Dean's river of gold.

Jacob - nice idea. Its amazing that when you take natural shapes and mirror them left/right you start to see faces in the formations.

Hi Ken - very dark. I'd not seen the series so I looked it up and you have the style captured

Semaphoric - send him back to the Amazon - he'll frighten the children here.

Like I said earlier - I wasn't sure whether this week's picture would generate many images. I'm glad to say I was wrong !

Dave

KShinabery212  this is like the river of blood I was expecting from, Graham.  Very spooky.

I masked in the tree limb and smaller branches for post #19.  There is bugger all colour in the sky, so any channel works.  It  was still a wee bit thin after a Levels and brush set to Overlay to reinforce the alpha channel, but the tree is mostly silhouette, so I copied the masked in tree a couple of times with it set to Multiply.  

It's usually a good idea to put some of the foreground back in front of composited objects IMO.  It gives them depth, and moves the object 'into' the scene.  Any little clue we can give the eye that 'this is real' adds up to  a more convincing composite/montage.

Hi

Kphotopage - welcome to Something for the Weekend.

I had to look twice there. At first I thought it was just a pile of fudge until I looked closer and saw the rock shapes of the original image in there - clever!

Dean - a river of gold - I'll take a bucket and sample a bit of that

Dave

Wow, so many entries this week.