PSP Animation Tutorial
I'm going to attempt an animation tutorial, as a few people requested one of me. It's pretty basic, and you need to have a general understanding of PSP, since I do a lot of my prep for animation in it, and Animation Shop. The tutorial uses PSP and Animation shop, so if you're a Photo Shop user, this probably won't be of much use to you. I'm going to demonstrate how I did the animation in the following three icons, as they're the ones I've gotten the most questions about, and some general tips on optimization.
1.
2. 
3. 
In general, animating for LJ icons can be frustrating. Sometimes I'll have a kick ass animation I absolutely love and have to butcher it to get it down to 40k. A good general rule is that any more than 7 frames is going to be hard to deal with. The amount of quality you have to sacrifice all depends on how many colors are in the animation, and how many frames you have. For example, if your icon has large patches of black or white, you can probably get away with 7-9 frames and not have to sacrifice on quality. But if the icon has a lot of varied, complex color, sometimes you can't get away with more than 4 or five. I'm just going to give a short rundown of how the quality of an icon is effected by the optimization levels, using this frame from one of the above icons:
On the highest optimization level, the frame (and the overall animation) will look like this:
The color is pretty well preserved, and everything looks great. Most of the time, if you have more than 4 or 5 frames, you won't be able to use this setting and have it fit the size limit.
The next step will leave you with a frame that looks like this:
This is the setting I try to use most of the time, as the colors are still pretty well preserved and the overall animation isn't compromised. Sometimes though, if you have 6 or 7 frames with a lot of colors, you have to go to the next setting.
The next setting leaves your frame looking like this:
As you can see, the quality is pretty compromised. Sometimes and icon will look alright at this setting, and sometimes it doesn't.
The next lowest setting looks like this:
I try to avoid using this setting, as you have a total of 31 colors, and that doesn't work with most animations.
That's pretty much as far as I'll get into general animation, as I'm certainly no expert. From here on out I'm going to focus on specific effects I use that people have asked about, using icons I've made as examples.
1.
I think it's easier to see how the overall animation works when you look at it frame by frame, so below are all the separate frames of this animation, and then I'll do a step by step of how each frame fits into the animation.
.
.
.
.
.
.
For this icon, I wanted the effect of the text zooming into the frame. There is no animation trick to this, I do it entirely in PSP. To the get the zoom effect for the first text, I did as so:
1a.
I started with a blank frame of my image. In PSP, I applied the text I wanted onto the frame, and made a copy of the merged (text+image) image.
On the unmerged copy, I did a motion blur effect, which is accessed at Effects > Blur > Motion Blur. I set the angle to 90, and the intensity to 40.
I then placed the frames in order, the blank first, the motion blurred text second, and the still frame with text third. This gives the text the appearance of zooming into the frame.
1b.
For the next step, the order will be a bit different. I don't need a blank frame at the end, since the text is zooming in from a somewhat different direction. Because of this, I only did the steps with the blur and text. I placed the frame with the zoom:
Before the frame with the text:
1c.
Now comes the somewhat complicated part. I want the transition between the two frames to be smoother, so I decided to add a fading effect. You'll see the effect above, in the middle of the icon. To so, I took the frame with the blurred text from the first portion of the icon:
And the one from the section portion:
And did a fade effect. Right now, I'm going to show the order the frames of the icon should be in, incase I've confused everyone.
......
Now comes the part where you have to have a general knowledge of how to work Animation Shop. I'm going to try and show things pretty step by step, but if you don't know your way around Animation Shop, you'll probably be lost . . . if you aren't already. To get the fade effect, I selected frame four:
I then went to Effects > Insert Image Transition:
You want to be sure that on the right and left side, you have "Animation Frame" selected. Select "Fade" from the effect list, and make sure the bottom dialogue tells you that the transition contains a total of one frame (for this animation, as using any more would have messed with the quality of the animation when saving).
When the two frames are faded, I now have this frame:
In the middle.
1d.
The animation part of the icon is now finished. The only thing left is to slow it down. A really common problem I see with most animated icons is that they move way too fast. It's impossible to read the text on an icon that's moving every 10/100th of a second. I use the general rule that if it has text, it needs to be anywhere from 150 up. To change the speed of your icon, go to Animation > Frame Properties. A dialogue box like this will appear:
For all my transitional elements, I put the frame display time at 12. For the frames with text, I used 200:
If you look closely at the bottom of this image:
The number after the D: is the amount of time the frame displays, so you can see which frames have what display time. Now it's time to save, which is of course located at File > Save. I went over the optimization levels at the start of this post, so you can check back if you're confused.
2.
For this icon, I'm only going to go into detail on the parts that are done differently from the first one. If I gloss over anything, it's because I already explained it in #1. Again, we'll start out by looking at all the individual frames in the animation:
.
.
.
.
.
.
For this animation, I basically wanted really sharp, fast effects. To do so, I took the two main, texted frames:
.
And used PSP to blur them. I used the same blurring effects I used on the text earlier, Effects > Blur > Motion Blur, angle at 90, and intensity at 40.
I posted the two frames between the main frame, so the order looked like this:
.
.
.
I then used the fade effect on the two blurred frames, adding the following transitional frame:
I decided I wanted the icon to flow more smoothly from the end frame to the first, so I decided to add another fade effect between the last frame and the first. To do so, I pasted a copy of the first frame:
After the last frame:
I used the fade effect, this time adding two transitional frames:
.
Then I deleted the duplicate first frame. I set the frame delay at 12 for the transitional images, and 200 for the texted main images, just as before:
Then saved.
3.
Again, same deal as before, if it was explained before it's only going to get a passing mention. As usual, here's the deconstructed icon:
.
.
.
.
.
.
The goal for this icon was fast, hectic movement coming to rest on the last frame.
To do so, I took all my still frames:
..
And made a copy of each. I then blurred the copies, like I did earlier, and ended up with these:
.
.
I placed each blurred image after it's still image, making the icon order this:
.
.
..
.
I then added my last frame, the one with the text:
For this icon, I made the still frames slightly slower than usual, setting them to 15 and the blurred frames to 10. I made the text frame 200 as usual:
I then saved, and viola, iconage.
That's pretty much it. If there's anything else you have a question about, or need me to clarify something, feel free to comment and ask!
1.
In general, animating for LJ icons can be frustrating. Sometimes I'll have a kick ass animation I absolutely love and have to butcher it to get it down to 40k. A good general rule is that any more than 7 frames is going to be hard to deal with. The amount of quality you have to sacrifice all depends on how many colors are in the animation, and how many frames you have. For example, if your icon has large patches of black or white, you can probably get away with 7-9 frames and not have to sacrifice on quality. But if the icon has a lot of varied, complex color, sometimes you can't get away with more than 4 or five. I'm just going to give a short rundown of how the quality of an icon is effected by the optimization levels, using this frame from one of the above icons:
On the highest optimization level, the frame (and the overall animation) will look like this:
The color is pretty well preserved, and everything looks great. Most of the time, if you have more than 4 or 5 frames, you won't be able to use this setting and have it fit the size limit.
The next step will leave you with a frame that looks like this:
This is the setting I try to use most of the time, as the colors are still pretty well preserved and the overall animation isn't compromised. Sometimes though, if you have 6 or 7 frames with a lot of colors, you have to go to the next setting.
The next setting leaves your frame looking like this:
As you can see, the quality is pretty compromised. Sometimes and icon will look alright at this setting, and sometimes it doesn't.
The next lowest setting looks like this:
I try to avoid using this setting, as you have a total of 31 colors, and that doesn't work with most animations.
That's pretty much as far as I'll get into general animation, as I'm certainly no expert. From here on out I'm going to focus on specific effects I use that people have asked about, using icons I've made as examples.
1.
I think it's easier to see how the overall animation works when you look at it frame by frame, so below are all the separate frames of this animation, and then I'll do a step by step of how each frame fits into the animation.
For this icon, I wanted the effect of the text zooming into the frame. There is no animation trick to this, I do it entirely in PSP. To the get the zoom effect for the first text, I did as so:
1a.
I started with a blank frame of my image. In PSP, I applied the text I wanted onto the frame, and made a copy of the merged (text+image) image.
On the unmerged copy, I did a motion blur effect, which is accessed at Effects > Blur > Motion Blur. I set the angle to 90, and the intensity to 40.
I then placed the frames in order, the blank first, the motion blurred text second, and the still frame with text third. This gives the text the appearance of zooming into the frame.
1b.
For the next step, the order will be a bit different. I don't need a blank frame at the end, since the text is zooming in from a somewhat different direction. Because of this, I only did the steps with the blur and text. I placed the frame with the zoom:
Before the frame with the text:
1c.
Now comes the somewhat complicated part. I want the transition between the two frames to be smoother, so I decided to add a fading effect. You'll see the effect above, in the middle of the icon. To so, I took the frame with the blurred text from the first portion of the icon:
And the one from the section portion:
And did a fade effect. Right now, I'm going to show the order the frames of the icon should be in, incase I've confused everyone.
Now comes the part where you have to have a general knowledge of how to work Animation Shop. I'm going to try and show things pretty step by step, but if you don't know your way around Animation Shop, you'll probably be lost . . . if you aren't already. To get the fade effect, I selected frame four:
I then went to Effects > Insert Image Transition:
You want to be sure that on the right and left side, you have "Animation Frame" selected. Select "Fade" from the effect list, and make sure the bottom dialogue tells you that the transition contains a total of one frame (for this animation, as using any more would have messed with the quality of the animation when saving).
When the two frames are faded, I now have this frame:
In the middle.
1d.
The animation part of the icon is now finished. The only thing left is to slow it down. A really common problem I see with most animated icons is that they move way too fast. It's impossible to read the text on an icon that's moving every 10/100th of a second. I use the general rule that if it has text, it needs to be anywhere from 150 up. To change the speed of your icon, go to Animation > Frame Properties. A dialogue box like this will appear:
For all my transitional elements, I put the frame display time at 12. For the frames with text, I used 200:
If you look closely at the bottom of this image:
The number after the D: is the amount of time the frame displays, so you can see which frames have what display time. Now it's time to save, which is of course located at File > Save. I went over the optimization levels at the start of this post, so you can check back if you're confused.
2.
For this icon, I'm only going to go into detail on the parts that are done differently from the first one. If I gloss over anything, it's because I already explained it in #1. Again, we'll start out by looking at all the individual frames in the animation:
For this animation, I basically wanted really sharp, fast effects. To do so, I took the two main, texted frames:
And used PSP to blur them. I used the same blurring effects I used on the text earlier, Effects > Blur > Motion Blur, angle at 90, and intensity at 40.
I posted the two frames between the main frame, so the order looked like this:
I then used the fade effect on the two blurred frames, adding the following transitional frame:
I decided I wanted the icon to flow more smoothly from the end frame to the first, so I decided to add another fade effect between the last frame and the first. To do so, I pasted a copy of the first frame:
After the last frame:
I used the fade effect, this time adding two transitional frames:
Then I deleted the duplicate first frame. I set the frame delay at 12 for the transitional images, and 200 for the texted main images, just as before:
Then saved.
3.
Again, same deal as before, if it was explained before it's only going to get a passing mention. As usual, here's the deconstructed icon:
The goal for this icon was fast, hectic movement coming to rest on the last frame.
To do so, I took all my still frames:
And made a copy of each. I then blurred the copies, like I did earlier, and ended up with these:
I placed each blurred image after it's still image, making the icon order this:
I then added my last frame, the one with the text:
For this icon, I made the still frames slightly slower than usual, setting them to 15 and the blurred frames to 10. I made the text frame 200 as usual:
I then saved, and viola, iconage.
That's pretty much it. If there's anything else you have a question about, or need me to clarify something, feel free to comment and ask!