(upbeat music)
- [Tony] I'm going to show you
how to quickly make an animated GIF,
like the one you can see here in Photoshop.
Because GIFs are,
despite the fact they came up years and years and years ago,
all the rage these days,
and people want to make them.
They're a great way to raise brand awareness.
And Photoshop's been able to do this for a very long time.
What I'm going to do here
is just stop this one from playing, okay?
And I'll turn off the layers that I've got here.
I'm basically going to select the image
that I have in the background here
and create a new document based on that
and paste that down like so.
So there's my cat.
Now for the eyes here I'd need to make a selection,
and that's easily done with the object selection tool.
So I can go ahead and pick that up from the toolbox
and I'm going to drag over the eye, like so,
and let it evaluate that and see what it returns for me.
So they are there, that's pretty good actually.
I think I could deal with that.
Maybe just go mask that a bit later on,
but I'm going to hold down the shift key here
and pick up the other eye, like so.
Do you know what? I am.
I'm just going to pop into select and mask
and use you refine edge here
to just get rid of this bit just here.
Perfect.
Nice and quick and easy.
And of course, because it's for a GIF,
it doesn't have to stick to the same criteria
that it might do for something else.
So I'm going to go ahead and actually save that selection
because it might be useful later on, okay?
And then I'm going to create a new layer.
So on my new layer, I'm going to choose a foreground color.
And I'd like sort of a nice green here for my lasers.
So I'll choose this really, really bright violent green.
It doesn't matter about all the warnings
because it's not going to be printed.
And then just going to hold down Alt or Option,
and Backspace to fill that on the layer, like so.
Okay, I can now de-select that,
and if I turn the light off and on, you can see it's there.
And what I'm going to do here
is reduce the opacity of this one down to 10%,
and I'll call this layer 10.
Then I'm going to duplicate that.
So Command + J, like so.
I'll call this one 20.
See if you can guess where I'm going with this one.
In fact, I'm going to do all the duplicates first.
So I'll just do three, four, five, like so.
So 30 just there, and 40 just there, and 50 just there.
And these are all going to add up nicely when this is going on.
So I'll go to this layer here, change this one to 20.
Go to this one here, 30.
This one here, 40.
And this one here, 50, like so.
So the varying opacity there.
I can turn all of these off if I want to.
I'm just going to duplicate
apart from maybe the one at the bottom,
or maybe even that as well.
I'll just duplicate this layer here.
So I'm going to call this 50 glow, like so.
Okay, and then add a layer of style to this.
I'm going to go for an outer glow.
And again, I'm going to choose sort of a green color, like so.
Okay,
and then make that nice and big on the outside just there
and bring the opacity up just a little bit.
Okay, that should be just fine the way it is.
And let's just preview that, if I turn that layer on.
Oh, excellent.
Then I'm going to go ahead and add a brand new blank layer
above that one, and I'm going to get my pen tool.
So, P for the pen tool.
I'm going to zoom out slightly as well.
Okay, and I'm going to make sure here
that I'm drawing paths, which I am.
Okay, and then I'm just going to click in a few places,
here like this.
Okay? To kind of get that shape there.
I'm just going to tap A on my cable temporarily
and just move this point.
Whoopsie daisy, if I just get that actual point.
Move that one down, like so.
Then I'm going to get my pen tool again
and add a similar thing just here.
So I'm just visualizing laser beams there.
Again, I'm just going to tune that corner there.
Okay, like so, nice and easy.
Then I'm going to get these paths
and turn them into a selection.
I could have actually done that with the pen tool
directly from there,
but I'll just do make selection here
with a feather radius of zero.
Now that's gone the wrong way round,
so I'm just going to invert that.
Shift + Command + I, Shift + Control + I.
And on this blank layer, fill that with green as well.
Okay, I can de-select that now,
and I'm going to duplicate that a few times.
So, Command + J, Command + J, Command + J just there.
That should be enough.
I'm then going to go to the first one of these layers, okay?
I'm going to go to the filter menu,
come down to distort and choose wave, okay?
And just do a few things in here
to just mess this around a little bit.
So I'm just going to shorten the wave length just there.
The number of generators,
I'm going to drop that down to four, like so.
And you can get a preview.
They could do with updating this, really,
so that it could change.
And I'll bring the scale down as well in both cases
just to get some nice variation around the size.
That's just fine.
So that works pretty well for that one.
I'll go ahead and make this one active
and then change the filter just slightly.
So hold down the Alt or Option key
and choose it from the top here.
Okay,
so I think maybe just pop the amplitude up
just a little bit here.
Bring those scales down, I think that will be fine.
It only needs to be a slight variation between each one.
And of course, we're doing this very, very quickly.
Okay, so that one as well,
I think that will be fine as it is.
And this last one also.
I'll hold on the Option key this time,
'cause I don't think I did last time.
Oops, and I didn't do that time either,
so I'll just undo and do that.
That's step is all important
because it's the one that allows you
to edit the effect, of course.
Hit OK. Wow, that's just crazy.
In fact, that's too crazy, so let's do that again.
This time with feeling.
Okay, I wasn't really looking at the preview
because it's too small.
But there we are.
Okay, so let's just go with that.
I think that's fine.
Okay, excellent.
So how do you build the GIF?
Well, it's here in the timeline panel,
which you get from the window menu.
If you don't see it already, choose create frame animation.
And then all you need to do is add a new frame each time
and then turn on the layers that you want in that frame.
So here, for example,
the eyes are going to get a little bit greener
and I'll add another layer
and then I'm going to turn on my 20 layer there, okay?
And of course,
they're adding up because they're both on top of each other.
I'll add another layer.
And by that, I mean frame.
And turn on that layer.
Add another one, like so.
And just carry on working through
until the cat's built up enough energy
in its eyes now to be ready to fire the beam.
So the glow is on.
Add yet another one here, turn on that layer.
Now,
this is where I need to kind of vary what's going on, right?
Because to turn that layer off and this layer on.
Okay, and add another frame.
I'll turn that one off and this layer on.
Actually, are they different enough, those two?
They're not actually because the filter ran the same way,
so I'll use this one just here
and turn this one off
and then add this one,
and I'll just go back to the middle one here.
Now ready test that out,
so I'll hit the play icon just here.
Nice.
Okay, and this stuff coming out just there.
And of course you could play with that as much as you want.
Here are the looping options, I've set that to forever.
And to explore that and actually make your GIF,
you go file, export, save for web legacy.
You've got to choose GIF in here.
Choose your color palette,
the smaller the colors you have,
then the more efficient it will be.
So I'm going to choose 32 no dither there.
And let me just try 32 dithered.
Okay, that background.
I think that looks fine
because the main area is going to be the cat.
You can see the options here for animation.
And then you just simply hit Save,
choose your location and you're done.
So there you are.
That's the quick way to make an animated GIF in Photoshop.
(upbeat music)