Timeline and exposures - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's take a look at the Adobe Photoshop animation timeline and how we create exposures. I've got the window docked down here. Double click on that little bar to open it. If you don't see it, it's under Window, Timeline. You can undock it, you can move it around, but I like it better here because it's long, because we're going to need space for all of our different animation frames. You're not seeing them now because we have to click Create Frame Animation. Let's do that. This converts the timeline into something that we can be more familiar with as animators. Now we can control this frame by frame. If you ever, for some reason, want to switch it back, you can click on here and go Convert to Video Timeline. It's very, very different. This is more for video editing than the kind of work we're doing. To flip back again, this little icon down here with the three squares, switches us to the timeline that we're going to use for the rest of this course. So what this does, essentially, it takes the familiar stack of layers, which you can see me creating here in a static image. So, what we can do now is play these frame by frame here. We have to make some exposures first. So, let me go to our little arrow here, and we can say play each frame for 1/10 of a second. These are increments of seconds, so this is 1/10 of a second. Let's pick that, that'll do us for now. The next thing would be to hide all of these. We just want to have the first animation frame, layer one, and I'm going to do a very simple five frame animation. So, let's say we have a tail. I'll make a new exposure now, and this will be showing us layer two. Now, I want to go from one to two. I'm going to use F1 and F2. I set up those shortcuts in the movie about shortcuts and setting up the presets. I can actually, on this exposure, fade that out. We can animate the next frame and now I can switch off the one beneath, and that's it. This should give you an idea of how we are going to proceed to do character animation in Photoshop. Make a new exposure, and I'm going to keep working straight ahead. I'm going to show me the layer beneath and continue with this animation, then switch that off. One, two, three, make one more exposure, and this will be for layer four. And I'll make one more exposure here, and this will be five. And I'm going to want five to cycle back into one, so I'm going to show me, temporarily show these three layers, and something like this. And if I unhide them, this little arrow here will hit Play. That's it, that's the procedure for setting up the timeline. That's how we set up exposures. If you want to use a different frame rate, then the procedure would be to make a custom frame rate. Let's say you're working on 24 frames per second, which I do a lot. Then we go to Other, and the increment we want here is 0.04. That will mean that every frame on the timeline is at 1/24 of a second. And we can actually do this by selecting the entire range, and now we're on 24 frames per second. We'll go into this in more detail later on, but that is essentially how we control our timeline, it's how we control the exposures, and it's how we control the length of time that those exposures are held for.