PHOTO ART: Mini-Challenge #08 - Red Rock Canyon, NV

[freddieanne]

That's great Kraelin. Can you explain how you do the animation

Thanks,
Annabel

[Kraellin]

thanks, Freddieanne.

sure, it's a simple .gif animation. you make up every frame individually and then join them all together with an animation program. i used jasc's animation shop that came with paint shop pro 7.

the hard part was making all the individual cells or frames. for that i took the original pic and masked the clouds out in a layer. i also had to select the cloud background out as a new image, then fill along the bottom of that new selection with clone and other similar techniques to get a full rectangle of clouds. that then became my base cloud picture for later use.

i then doubled the width of the base cloud pic, but left the height the same. the reason for this is that i'm going to paste the base cloud pic back into sequential layers, but move it slightly to the right each time. if i didnt double the width, i'd run out of base cloud pic on the left as i moved the image right.

i also extended the base cloud pic's canvas size vertically, turned on the grid set to the size of each frame distance i wanted to move the base cloud pic, and then added in a vertical guide line along the bottom in the new extended area to help me line up each new frame that was going to be made.

as i pasted the base cloud pic back into the original on a new layer, i would use the guides i'd made at the bottom to move it one more cell to the right. i did this 32 times to get 32 layers with the base cloud pic moved over one cell each time.

after i had all my layers, i simply turned on the original layer with the masked sky, and the first cloud layer. i then did a copy visible layers and hit control V to make a new image of it. i then turned off the cloud 1 layer and turned on cloud layer 2 and repeated the copy and paste. then just repeat this for every cloud layer, giving me 32 new images with no masks and no extra layers. these would become my frames in the animation. 32 frames with the clouds move slight to the right in each successive frame.

then i simply called up animation shop, loaded all the individual frames into an animation framer in the right order and tested it. when everything looked ok, i saved the original with no compression or lost quality. but, that made almost a 4 meg file; too large to post here

to get the file smaller for posting here, i had to resize the animation frame size and use compression. the original file size of the original image was 800 x 600. my frames ended up having to be about 250 x 168, or something like that, and i had to use a 75% compression rate. all in all, this ended up being about a 90% reduction over the original.

now, i could have done a seamless looping, where you wouldnt see it jump back to the start of the loop each time, but that would have required a fair amount of extra work, since i caught my mistake a bit late in the process.

for anyone wishing to do things like this, i HIGHLY recommend working the entire process out ahead of time, step by step. i went the rough route just working things out as i went. there's prolly easier ways to do this also, but i just went with what came to mind at the time. there's prolly also better animation programs out there as well, even for simple .gif animations. if you really want to get into it, get something like macromedia flash. that's kind of the photoshop of flash/animation....and nearly as expensive

also, bear in mind that with animations of the kind i did, there tends to be a bit of repetitive work that can get a bit boring at times....make a layer, paste the clouds, move them to a precise location, set them, test each frame, turn off the previous layer, make a new layer of the one just created, rinse and repeat 32 times.

K.

[freddieanne]

Wow!!
Thanks for the detailed explanation Kraellin. Quite an involved and labor intensive process it seems. You had great results though.

Thanks again
Annabel

[Kraellin]

thanks annabel. yes, they can be fun to do...especially once done

here's the full sized animation without compression. 56'ers beware; it's a 3 meg file ( i said 4 above, but it's 3).

http://mizus.com/kraellin/red-rock-1-k-1.gif

give it a minute to load each frame and then it shld run. i tried it in preview mode here before posting and it does work, but for some reason it's running quite slowly. if you want to save it and run it separately, i believe you can simply 'save target as' to download it.

K.

[cazubi]

Very nice effect Kraellin. It seems very complicated.

Cathy

[Kraellin]

thanks cazubi.

it's really not much more than anything you're doing already, layers, masking, cut and paste... the hard part is the bulk of it. once the frames are all made, animation shop puts it all together pretty easily.

K.

[Tigron]

Red Rock Canyon, NewMoon.NV

http://img316.imageshack.us/img316/5...aredrockca.jpg



p.s what should I do to have the pic in thumbnail....? not sure how to do it here....tks...

[twinkissed]

Originally Posted by freddieanne

OK, I know I'm a nerd, but I couldn't help myself. Having done a lot of hiking on redrock, looking at this photo I was reminded how sandy it is. Hence my crazy idea. You said to have fun Danny.

My first photo art.

Annabel

I think that's a fantastic photo art. Like it should be called "True Sands of Time". Absolutely great how you put the two together.

[Steve Conway]

Buzz simplifier & edge color, played with blend modes, copied, pasted as new layer, over original, played with blend modes again. Merged.

Steve