Animating in Photoshop?

In this video, I'm going to show you how to animate in Adobe Photoshop and... yeah, Rolf? Rolf: Why the (bleep) would anyone animate in Photoshop? Rolf: It's a (bleep) pain in the (bleep). Yeah, he's got a point there. There are some cases where you might not want to use Photoshop for animation. We're also going to talk about that. Getting started with animation in Adobe Photoshop is actually quite simple. You need to go to file, create a new file here, and as a format you should select one from

film and video. And there we have full HD, HDTV, which is a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. This is the pixel size that at the moment is used by most HD television and its perfect for our animation. So let's hit create and let's get started. One of the most important tools for animation is the timeline, and in Photoshop, you bring that up by going to window and select the timeline. Now that we have the timeline panel down here, we can go ahead and create a new video timeline. Before we go any

further, there are a couple of things that you might want to check here at the menu of the timeline panel. First of all, we wanna look at the timeline frame rate. As you can see, it shows the default frame rate 29.97 frames per second. Personally, I prefer 24 frames per second, much more. This is the frame rate that is being used in cinema. It's much easier to calculate with, you have 24 frames for your full second, 12 frames for half a second, six frames for quarter seconds. It's just much eas

ier to calculate with. So let's select that and hit okay. Another important thing to activate in the same menu is the option enable timeline shortcut keys. Only with this option enabled, you will later be able to use the arrow keys to navigate in the timeline and go one frame forward and one frame backward with the arrow keys. And the third thing I want to change is in the same menu, go to panel options and switch it from Time code to frame number because in 2D animation you usually plan your an

imation with the frame numbers and not with the time code. So let's hit okay and now we have all the basic settings out of the way. I wanna show you two types of layers to animate with in Adobe Photoshop. The first type that I wanna show you is actually nowhere to be found anywhere near the timeline. Most important animation functions are hidden all over the interface, and Photoshop really makes you go to different corners of the software for things that I think should all be in one place. Anywa

y, the first type of layer that I wanna show you can be found up here in the layer menu, and there you have video layers and you can create a new blank video layer. As you can see, the layer appeared both in the timeline and over here in the Layers panel. And this is something that Photoshop shares with other animation software, that it will collect the layers both in a layer list and in the timeline. Right now the timeline cursor should be at frame zero all the way at the left. We can use this

slider down here to zoom in and out of our timeline. If I choose the pen tool to draw something, you can see I can draw in that video layer. If I go one frame forward, which now I should be able to do with the keyboard arrows, you can see that the second frame is empty and I can draw my line in there, and I can flip between the two and see that this could be the start of an animation. Right now the video layer is working on 24 frames per second. Every new frame, the video layer is empty, and I c

an put a new drawing inside there. This is not how most animations are created, and this is one of the biggest problems that I have with Photoshop and this specific layers because it nudges beginners to just draw 24 frames per second, one after the other. This is not how professional animators work. Professional animators, especially when they use a pose to pose workflow, block out their motion by holding frames for longer periods of time. And most of the time professional animators do not actua

lly draw 24 frames per second. In most cases, if you have motions that are relatively slow, it's enough to have a frame rate of 12 frames per second, and you can get that by, in a 24 frames per second project, exposing one drawing for two frames. This is called animating on twos when you hold one drawing for two frames and most of the time you would probably want the video layer to behave like this. So what we can do is we can change the frame rate of this video layer to 12 frames per second, wh

ich will cause it in a 24 frames per second timeline to expose every single drawing for two frames instead of offering a new empty drawing on every single frame. To change this with the video layer selected, we have to go up to the layer menu again, go to video layers and can't do anything, which is uh, wonderful. Okay, so apparently it only sometimes registers that we have a video layer selected. Now we can go to interpret footage and change it from 24 frames per second to 12 frames per second.

Now if we zoom in, we can see that indeed every drawing is now held for two frames. 1, 2, 1, 2. And here we can start drawing our next drawing and it will be held for this frame and it should be held for the next one too. Oh yeah, there, it's just randomly appeared. Okay, so all good. You can click on the arrow here at the video layer to open it, and there you can see that each frame is marked down here. You can't, like in many other animation software, click on any of these frames and drag the

m or make be held for a longer period of time. But at least there are some things that you can do up here in layer video layers. You got a couple options. You can create a new blank frame. You can duplicate frames, and you can delete frames and have all the other frames ripple up to the point where you just deleted a frame. So that is working quite well if you realize your animation has been going to slow or if you want to add a new frame in between. Then you can do that by clicking on insert bl

ank frame, and actually that looks a little bit odd what it is doing right there. Maybe I have to hit it two times to make sure... no, it looks like it failed to insert a frame in between, which might be because the timeline and the video layer frame rate is not lining up. No, now it did it. Now there's another set of two frames. So as you can see, there are a couple of things that can be done with this layer, but most notably, we cannot hold this last frame. Let's say this is the end of our an

imation or almost the end of our animation, and we just wanna hold a drawing still for a longer period of time. We cannot do it with this layer. We would have to. Zoom out and cut the layer off and switch to another type of layer that can be shown for a longer period of time, and just hold the drawing that we put in there. The other important type of animation layer you can create also not by using this toolbar, which would be an excellent place to put anything. No, on one of the layers, click o

n the arrow next to the film strip here, and then choose new video group and in this video group, you can create new drawings. First of all, we need to make sure that we have the video group selected. We can either do that in the timeline or here in the layers panel, and now we can click that little plus symbol to create a new layer. And as you can see, this layer has an insane length of five seconds. No idea why they would program it like this, because you never ever wanna have a default drawi

ng length of five seconds. So what you do a lot when you animate with this kind of layer in Photoshop is you have to trim it down to the length that you actually want to have, which is usually one frame. Or maybe if you're working on twos, can be a two frames length - unless we have an object of course, that we do wanna hold. We could continue the animation that started in this video layer and end it even on the same track, on this kind of layer. Then this could be our end frame, and this one ca

n be held indefinitely. Now if we wanted to continue the animation with this kind of video group, we could select this layer and again, hit that icon down there to create a new drawing. And as you can see it attached a new drawing at the end of it again, with this insanely long default length. So let's say you wanted to continue the animation here using twos. You could make sure that you trim this down to a length of two frames. And you could just already copy and paste this empty frame by hitti

ng Ctrl + C and then hitting Ctrl + V a couple of times. So you would have created a couple of empty frames for you to animate on. Oh, you need to make sure that you click on the frame that you want to draw on. That's also very important. It will not automatically highlight the drawing for you to draw on, so when you go on with your animation, you need to make sure that you have this frame selected. This is also something that I think is quite unusual for an animation software. Usually you only

have to select the layer and then it will select the drawing for you as you scrub through the timeline. But in Photoshop, you have to make sure that you have the current layer selected. Now this could be drawing number two. And now the good thing about this one is you can change the order. I can take number two and drag it over here, and then I would've changed the order. And that is especially important if you're making a motion longer or shorter, or you are working with walk cycles this is ver

y vital to be able to click select, copy, paste, duplicate, in the way that you can with this type of layer and this is just much closer to how you would work in other professional animation software. I do wanna show you a workaround that many people use to create a new drawing that is just one or two frames long. Like this can be a lot of clicks to cut it down to the length that you actually want it. So what people do is they record an action that creates a new drawing and then cuts it down to

two frames. To do this, we need the action panel. You can find that in window actions. In the actions panel, I already have a group named Animation. So maybe you want to create one two by clicking on the folder. And in this folder, we are going to create our first action by clicking on the plus icon here. And this is gonna be our action to create new drawing on twos. If you hit record, Photoshop is now recording almost any click that you make. And when you execute this action, it's gonna do thes

e clicks again. These actions need to be made after you've set up the frame rate for your project. Right now, we are in a 24 frames per second timeline. If I would use these actions that I'm creating now in a 29.97 timeline, it would cut them to the wrong length. So it's important that you set up your frame rate first, and once you assure that is set up to be the frame rate that you always want to use, then you can start recording your action. So let's hit record and now we can use the plus symb

ol to create a new drawing. And then we cut this drawing down to only two frames. And that's it. Now we can hit the little stop button down here to finish recording our action. Now we can collapse this action and whenever we want to create a new drawing on twos, all we have to do is select that action and hit the play button. It's going to create the new drawing after the currently selected layer. So if we have this one selected and we hit the play button for the new drawing on twos, it's going

to create a new drawing on twos right here. And it's very handy that it is already selected because that means I can immediately start drawing in it. A very important function for animation is onion skinning, which allows you to see the previous and the next frame already shining through. You can activate that by going to that menu and clicking on Enable onion skins. This is the drawing. And when we go to the next one, we can still see this shining through with a lower opacity. There are also so

me options for the onion skin that you can find in that very same menu under onion skin settings. There you can change how many frames you see before and after. And if you're working on twos, it might make sense to set frame spacing to two, so it always jumps in increments of two frames. Now let's hit okay. And we can see that this is the previous frame and this is the next frame. And when we are in the middle, we see both of them. And we can use this to create the lines in between the two draw

ings. When we switch off onion skin, we can flip through the images and see what we already have created so far. Now you might be wondering, hey, the all the important functions seem to be there. You can create drawings, you can change their exposure. You have onion skin. Why wouldn't you recommend using Adobe Photoshop as an animation software? Well, the problem is that while the functions are technically there, I feel like they always require more clicks than they do in other animation softwar

e. If you work on an animation for days, weeks, months, these little clicks and you know, some functions you find over here, some functions you find down there, some functions you need to build yourself in action for first. These little things ant up and they can rip you out of the flow of just animating. Think about how you can create a new drawing in Open Toonz. You can just extend the exposure of a drawing draw anywhere in between, and where you just start drawing, it will create a new drawin

g. You don't have to change the exposure by, by dragging it, it's much more intuitive. It almost feels a little bit like they added animation features in Photoshop because they wanted to complete a feature list. And less like they actually asked animators, how would you like to animate? What makes it easier for you to animate? There are many other details like in lots of other animation software, you can color the onion skin, so the previous frame could be red and the next frame could be green.

You can achieve that in Photoshop, but only through some very clunky workarounds. And the fact that when scrubbing through the timeline, the drawings don't get auto selected, this is also something that costs an insane amount of time. Maybe I'm doing injustice to Photoshop. Maybe I just haven't found those magic buttons that do all this. I do know that workarounds exist. I do know that there are some dedicated users figuring out how to do this a little bit quicker in Photoshop, but that still do

esn't change that this is Adobe's job to make an interface that works more intuitively, it shouldn't be the job of the user. There are paid add-ons. There is an animation toolbar that is probably pretty amazing that adds all of the important animation functions in a toolbar right above the timeline. And while I think it's a great thing, it's just 20 bucks or something like this is totally okay, the problem is that Adobe doesn't commit to make Photoshop a good animation software. The default leng

th of a drawing being five seconds. That is an issue that has been open on their forum for years and they haven't fixed that. Plus, while I was doing some little test animations in Photoshop, I always had the problem of sometimes frames not updating or not showing up where they should be showing up. These seem to be some complex like hardware performance problems. Which I don't know if they don't even change the default length of a drawing, how committed are they to actually fix the performance

and display errors? All that being said, I still think you can animate in Photoshop and you can probably do amazing animations because all the basic functions are there. You just really need to think about some workarounds and you need to be aware of some potential problems that could arise. And this brings me to the flip side of that coin. Why would you use Photoshop as an animation software? Well, Photoshop's brush engine is amazing. You can create awesome creative brushes. You can emulate cha

rcoal and pencil and probably watercolor and whatnot. A lot of digital painters paint in Photoshop because of its amazing brush engine. And if you want to create an animation that is built around a painterly look or emulating charcoal or something like this, then I can really see why you would have to animate that in Photoshop. I really like Open Toonz as an alternative, but the brush engine while getting better and better is arguably not as good as Photoshop's. If you switch to Adobe animate or

you use vector layers in Open Toonz, then you are stuck with that plain line that cannot have much of a texture. I mean, they do have like texture functions, but you know, they're not as good as the Photoshop brushes. If you are a beginner and you don't have anything else than Photoshop right now, you can do your first steps of learning animation in Photoshop and do your first animation exercises, bouncing ball, and all this good stuff. But it will ultimately teach you a bad workflow with too m

any clicks, with the constant need to find workarounds. you know This is not the worst thing that can happen, lots of us started learning bad animation software and using it the wrong way. I think it would be a little bit easier and less frustrating to start with a software that actually supports the way how professionals would animate a scene and Photoshop does not do that. As an alternative, you might want to check out Open Toonz. We have Open Toonz tutorials on this very channel as well. If y

ou decided you want to give Photoshop a go, maybe you wanna watch this follow up bonus video where I show a pose to pose animation workflow, how a professional animator might use it at a studio of how to animate a bouncing ball. Thank you so very much for watching. If you like the way how I do tutorials and live streams, you might want to consider supporting me on patreon.com/animatorisland. And I hope you have a fantastic day. Keep on animating. It's called Photoshop. Photo (bleep) shop. It is

not called Animateshop. No. (bleep)... it's in the name Photoshop. Adobe has an Animate program. Nobody's gonna watch this (bleep) tutorial. Nobody cares. Nobody's searching "animate in (bleep) Photoshop"... because it's not for animation. Why am I even, why am I even here? Oh, I need a raise.