About ImageReady
ImageReady is the animation program that comes with Photoshop. Yes, it's all bundled into the art program and it's been hidden this whole time- until now. To get to ImageReady, simply click on the button at the bottom of the button bar.
Although you can do the art in ImageReady itself, some of the features are limited so it's best if you draw everything in Photoshop first, then click on the button. :)
What are frames? They're the pictures that make up an animation. You may have heard people say something's "20 frames per second" or something like that. That means that for every second that goes by, twenty pictures had to be drawn. Since the pictures are going a lot faster, it makes the animation smooth. If an animation was one frame per second, it would be really chunky. Look at the difference in these:
Okay, so by now you're probably wondering how you get all these frames and where they're coming from. They're located right in the Animation Panel, which should be at the bottom of your screen in ImageReady. If it's not, go to Window- Show Animation. If you had an image in Photoshop then clicked on the ImageReady button, you'll already have the first frame. Otherwise you have to open an existing image to start working.
To make a new frame (the more frames the smoother your animation will be) just click on the paper with a folded corner. This will just duplicate your frame, which isn't going to make anything animated, so what you have to do is adjust the layers. In the Layers palette (Window- Show Layers) find the thing you want to move. You should have multiple layers of it. With your second frame selected, click on the eye next to the first layer of the soon-to-be animated thing in order to hide it, then click on the blank square on the next layer to show that layer.
What you're basically trying to do is 1. have multiple layers of the same thing, slightly altered each time so it creates an animation and 2. show one of the layers at a time while hiding the rest so you can successfully have an animation.
If you were animating a person, only one Person layer at a time would be showing (have the eye next to it). However, you would still want to keep the background, like trees and a sidewalk, always showing so the person doesn't jump off the end of the world in the next frame.
Those are just the basics about animating in ImageReady. Although it takes practice to get animations just how you want them, you should always remember to have fun. :)
