Avatar-of-Eccentricity

I made a rotating logo animation for a site, buts it's really jerky. This is probably because I made it using the distort tool frame-by-frame...

Is there any easy way I can smooth it out a bit, without having to do something 20 times?

Also, is there an easier way to make a similar animation than the way I did?

\:]

Thanks

retired_Craig

I'm not a pro, but I would say -- instead of using the distort option, try using the scale option! This might bring it all together smoother for you. If not, sorry!

As far as doing it 20 times, sometimes you have to make a lot of frames to get it to look smooth. I created an avatar a while back that took 36 separate layers to look nice.

Here is the avatar

Welles

That's a very cool design A 'o E. Let me say I thought you did really well. The biggest visual irregularity came in the central long segment. I thought I'd give a try at smoothing it out by opening up your original, taking the frame with the front view and trying to recreate your rotation by using mathematical precision.

I opened your GIF and took the frame which had the front view of the rotating portion made a new PSD of that layer. I used the magic wand tool to select and cut that red widget to a new layer. I used a selection and radial gradient to repair the background layer.

For simplicity sake I decided to use 10 frames to get the first 90? of turn. So I first duplicated the 'widget' layer 10 times and worked my way up the ladder of layers, so to speak. On the layer immediately above the widget layer layer I recreated the distort you used by using Command (Control) + T two separate times. First I transformed the widget by entering 3? in the 'set vertical skew' of the Transform tool bar. After that I transformed that same layer again by reducing the horizontal size by 10% (entering (90% in the Set Horizontal Scale box). As I worked my way up the copies it went v 6? followed by W 80%, v 9? followed by W 70% etc. The final wasn't at O% but actually at 2 so there was a thin line of red. Then I copied the layers in reverse order and Transform > Flip Horizontal on each. Whew! Sometimes you just have to do things by hand!

Anyway, here's the result. It is slightly better than your original because there is no apparent irregularity of the width of the central piece of the widget. I could have used more frames and had the gif a little smoother.

Avatar-of-Eccentricity

Excellent -- thank you!

8))

retired_Craig

Wow Welles, that's great work there -- and yes it is a lot of work to get a smooth animated gif! 8)) 8D 8} [righton]

deadfishy00

for gifs can you make one by just using photoshop 7?

Welles

Sure can, deadfishy00. What I usually do is make all my frames as separate layers in Photoshop and then launch ImageReady by using the "Send to ImageReady" icon at the bottom of the Tools palette. Once there I create the animation with each layer one frame, set the delay, and Save Optimized... Give it a try and if you get stuck try the ImageReady help first and then give us a holler if that doesn't answer your questions.

deadfishy00

trying out gif stuff

Welles

Way to go, deadfishy00! Is that your first animation? I've got a couple of suggestions. When you open the layered Photoshop file in ImageReady and have all the frames loaded in the Animation palette, look below each of the frames. You will see "0 sec." Click on that and you can change the amount of time each frame is displayed. It's called delay. While the normal options go down to .1 sec, there is a custom option where you can enter smaller intervals. I opened your GIF in ImageReady and changed the delay to .15 and saved it once again. I also thought about having the last frame longer but didn't bother. To change all the frames at once click on the first and Shift click on the last and all will be highlighted. Change the delay on one and all will change.

Then I looked at the Optimize palette and dropped the number of colors from 256 to 32 and selected No Dither. There's an additional change I made to the animation which is to change the Disposal to Automatic. Next to the seconds below each frame is an obscure little dotted icon. Alt (Option) click on that and you can change the disposal. Generally Automatic is the best setting. The changes I made were to slow down each frame and reduce the file size. Your original was 100K, my modifications (primarily reducing the color palette to 32 colors) reduced it to 44K. Here's the result.

deadfishy00

thanks and yes it is my first animation i've made just learend it 2 days ago

and another qusetion, is there a way to layer layers ? ive tried to do it by doing the normal layering method but it didnt work