Animation in Photoshop

[djedamrazuk]

I've came across a cool looping animation, that's apparently done entirely in Photoshop. I am a sucker for super heroes and I collect similar designs for a long time - but this one is animated, in photoshop!
In it's description it says that it's very easy to do. I use Photoshop for many years and I never saw something like that before, so my question is how is this done? Is it really not hard to do so? Why is the internet not already populated with similar animations if it's easy to make? I saw those 'Cinemagraphs' before and I always thought it's a work of art, but this is not a cinemagraph - or it maybe is? I am kinda lost, I use photoshop to retouch photos, but this really got my attention. Doing a little research, I found another animation also done in photoshop, that is kinda similar - it shows a photo (apparently any photo will do) and some realistic looking snow falling around. What is this technique called, is it hard to create similar stuff (cuz I have many ideas now) and can I do something like this in Photoshop Elements?

 

[MrToM]

In a nutshell...

Create a layer for each 'frame' of your animation...



Save your work as a PSD file.
Then use Save As.. and select 'gif' as the format.
You'll get a dialog asking about the properties of the file.
Make sure you select 'gif' as the format.....then check the 'Animate' option...



Save the file.



Some things to check for yourself...

1. Earlier versions of Elements limited the number of frames to 17....I used Elements 13 but only 15 frames so don't know if later versions allow more.

2. Transparency:
There is an option for transparency in 'gif' files but its very much either on or off.
Even though the option can be turned on in the Save As... dialog it may not be possible to use transparency in any layer in order to animate objects on top of say a background layer. (Like your snow example)

You may find that you need to 'Merge' the background with each frame of animation in order for the 'gif' to work.

In my [very simple] example I 'merged' the white background with each 'frame' of the red circle motion....resulting in 15 layers none of which had any degree transparency in them...



Its for this reason you may need to save your work as a PSD file BEFORE merging the layers so that you still have an 'editable' copy to work from.

Its not impossible to do animation in Elements but of course being 'Elements' you are limited as to what can be done.

Just check its limitations before you get your hopes up too high.

Regards.
MrToM.