AboutLizaL Expertise I've used Photoshop since the release of version 2. I taught college commercial art and graphic design for 10 years, and within that realm, taught Photoshop at every level, and with each successive product upgrade. My experience with Photoshop is thus extensive and well-rounded, from photo retouching to color adjustment to incorporating Photoshop and ImageReady into Web design. I am primarily a Mac user (since 1985), but am also PC-savvy.
Experience I've been a graphic designer for 22 years, was a national magazine art director, a designer for the Department of Defense, a college art instructor, and have my own freelance Web and graphic design business, LittleWorks (www.little-works.com). I've also worked for several printing companies, in both prepress and art.
Awards and Honors PICA award (Printing Industry of the Carolinas Award for the design of a media kit that accompanied a magazine I was art directing at the time)
Question Hi i have two pictures pic A and pic B i was wondering if or how i could get pic A to slowly(or not so slowly) fade into Pic B and go back and forth between the two i tried this method
1. Put one image on top of the other on a layer.
2. Click the "Layer Mask" button on the top layer. (The button is at the bottom of the Layers palette.)
3. Now click on the layer mask, so you are working on the layer mask and not on the layer. (It's to the right of the layer icon in the palette.)
4. Get the "Gradient" tool.
5. Set the Gradient tool to "Foreground to Transparent" (this is at the top of the Photoshop screen.)
6. Make sure you have Black as your foreground color.
7. Drag the Gradient tool from dead center of the image to the edge of the image holding the "Shift" key to keep it paralel. Do this four times -- left, right, up and down, in any order
but all i get is a black circle in the middle of the top layer not sure if what i want is possable was just wondering if anyone knew
Answer Hi Will,
Tell me if I have this right: You actually want to animate two pictures in Photoshop? Photoshop isn't the program for that -- it doesn't do animations, but ImageReady does very basic animations. If you click on the bottom button in the Photoshp tool palette, you'll automatically jump to ImageReady. Whatever file you have open in Photoshop will now be ready for editing in ImageReady.
In ImageReady, put both pictures into one file, and put each in its own separate layer. Now open the Animation palette (from the Window pulldown menu), and also your Layers palette (also from the Window pulldown menu).
As a default the Animation palette will show one frame. Now click on the blank page icon at the bottom of the Animation palette to add another frame. In the first frame, make sure the one layer is selected and the other is not. Now, in your new frame, make sure the *other* layer is selected, and the first one is not.
Select both frames and from the little flyout menu on the Animation palette -- the little triangle on the top right of the palette -- choose Tween. Then type in a number of frames that you want ImageReady to automatically add. Tweening is short for "in-betweening," meaning these frames will be inserted in between your original two frames. The tweening of an animation is what causes it to appear to fade. You can play around with the number of tweening frames you want to add.
Now, at the bottom of the Animation palette, you'll see Play, Stop, Fast Forward and Rewind buttons. Here's where you can play your animation to see if it's to your liking.
If not, select all your frames -- and you can do that manually, by holding down the Shift key and clicking on each one, or by selecting Select All Frames from the flyout menu -- and change the timing, and the looping options. The time is changed via popup menu below the animation, and the looping options are found at the bottom left of the animation palette.
The problem with this is that you can only export animations made of photographs as QuickTime movies or Flash .swf (Shockwave Flash) files.
On the other hand, if you're not using photographs and using graphics instead, you can save these ImageReady animations as animated GIFs. You can also output as HTML and images, in this case. But using photographs as animations in ImageReady is a little limited.
If you really want to do animation, I'd suggest downloading a trial version of Flash from the Adobe Web site.
If it looks like what you want / need, it'd be wise to purchase it. I've been using Flash for years, and love it. To me, there's no comparison and it's the program I would recommend for animation.
Now if you have a question about using Layer Masks, please post back and tell me, and I'll be glad to help. But it sounds to me like you're asking for directions on creating a basic animation.
Hope this helps --
Lisa
P.S. I tried what you said you'd done, and it worked for me, to fade the images -- but they will not fade back and forth on their own, without some sort of animation driving this effect.
I used your steps, and they worked, but like I say, this will give you a static image, and not a real animation. Here's how I did it:
Maybe the reason you're getting the black circle is because you're not actually clicking on your layer mask. In the Layers palette, the layer mask is the actual rectangle to the right of the chain-link icon, beside the thumbnail image on the active layer. Make sure you click right in that rectangle, instead of in the image itself.
