Animating a logo with keyframes in Photoshop

- For this next activity, I'm going to show you how Photoshop can be used as a motion graphics tool on its own. Now, I would strongly recommend that you investigate working in Premiere or better yet After Effects, but if you are limited, Photoshop does provide some rudimentary keyframe capabilities. A keyframe is where you define in the computer, a position or a state. For example, one keyframe could be with me that I'm over here. Then three seconds later, another key frame could be set where I'm over here. Well, what would happen is the computer would smoothly interpolate that motion allowing for movement between the two frames. This sort of technique is very standard in animation, and it's useful to define the starting or end position when animating. Let me show you, I'll open up here and navigate to the folder called 4C Using Keyframes in Photoshop. And there are two Photoshop documents in here. Open them both up. Now you'll notice that I have a timeline visible at the bottom. If you don't see that, go under the window menu and choose timeline. Here, we have one called logo animated and another called prepped. Let's look at the logo animated, which is already built. So you can see what's happening. I'll press the space bar. In this case, different parts of the logo move and come into play. What happens is for example, the pieces rotate in from the sides and land, and then other parts animate on or begin to fade up. Well, each of these has different controls. So for example, if I look at the properties here, you see that a keyframe for opacity was used to fade the red square from not being visible to visible. And if we look at some of the other layers here, you'll notice that different techniques were used. So for example, on the word Raster here, we keyframed the transform property, so the layer moves from different positions in to play. Well, that means that animation occurs over time. Okay, you've seen what's possible with an animation. Now let's build one from scratch. It doesn't have to be exact, but I want you to see the process. Typically I would do this animation in After Effects or Premiere, but you can make it work in Photoshop. Let's switch to the other document, and we've got all of our pieces. What we want to do here is convert each of these to a smart object one at a time. This way, not only do we embed a full quality copy, but we have the ability to now use the transform command as an animation tool. This will allow us to move the object, and while using those keyframes create movement, I'll just leave this last layer untouched. Down here in the timeline, you also want to change this. So click and choose to convert to a video timeline. If necessary, you can also adjust other properties here and change things like the frame rate to match whatever your deliverable is such as 29.97. Now let's start to animate. What we're going to do is add keyframes for each of these layers. Let's start with something simple, like the word Raster. I'll turn the visibility icon off for the other layers so we're a little more narrowly focused. Let's come in here and drag to about three seconds and twirl down the controls. What I can now do is turn on the stopwatch for transform. That adds a keyframe. What we're going to do is show the transform controls here, and that's giving us this bounding box. So that works pretty well. I can uncheck that. Now let's go back to about one second, and I'll add another keyframe, but press command + T for free transform. Here I want to make sure that this is checked, and I'm going to anchor that in the upper left corner. Now, what I could do is rotate this, and in fact, I can also scale it if I wanted to make it a bit bigger, and we'll drag it off of the frame. Now let's press play, and you see that it rotates into place and lands. Well, that's cool. Let's do a similar animation on the word Vector, and we'll come in here and twirl down to see the controls, and I'm going to add keyframes at the same time point. Notice you can click here to navigate very easily between keyframes. So I'll jump forward and add a keyframe, press command + T, and this time I'm going to pin that to the upper right corner, and we can twirl that. Scale it really big. And move it to a lower corner. Now you see that the two of them rotate and land at the same time, creating a jaws type motion. And I like that. Let's add a few more animations. Again, we don't have to do everything here, but I want you to see what's possible. That looks good. So now let's take a look at the box from behind. What I want is that this fades into place. So at about the two second mark, with the box layer active, what we'll do is add a keyframe for opacity, and we can set that to zero. Now let's go to the four second mark or so, add another keyframe, and set that back to a hundred. And what you'll see is that the box now fades into place as the elements land. I like that. Let's take a look at the line here. How about a different type of animation? As the pieces land, right about there let's have that line grow. So we'll click on transform, and then go forward to that four second mark and add the keyframe. Now what we're going to do is transform this, command + T, and what I'm going to do is uncheck the box here, but set the width to zero and have it scale from the center. Now that's pretty cool. Now let's select that first key frame there and press command + T. And what I'm going to do here is hold down the option key and scale that towards the center. And we'll just set that there to 0%. Now, watch what happens. The line grows. So as those elements land, the line grows in place like an underline, which is pretty cool. All right, that's looking pretty good. And what I want to do is come to stroke here and do the same sort of thing. So let's set that to 0% opacity. We'll click to go forward, add another keyframe and change that to a hundred. So the box fades in at the same time, and let's finish it off with our two squares here, the red square and the black square. We'll start these, so they animate a little earlier. So let's have those land by about one 1:15. So let's go here to the red square and the black square, and we'll turn on transform and style, transform and style. Now we can go a bit earlier. And what I'm going to do is add a glow. So I could choose that red square and say outer glow. Let's get a nice, big, thick glow on it. We'll choose red and click okay. And we can make that very visible and very large and spread out. Now be careful as you play with that for the size. You don't want it to pop too much, but that's working pretty well there. And I've got a nice glow. I can also choose the gradient here if needed, and go with a more precise glow. And you see how it plays into that. Now feel free to experiment, but all I'm creating there is a little bit of a glow on the object. And I like that. Let's make that a little bigger. Perfect. And I'll click okay. So now we have the initial style, that's a glow. And if I go forward here, you see it disappeared. So we can actually change that. And like we saw with transform, we can modify these very quickly. There's our red square. Let's make sure that the layer is highlighted. There it is. And I'll do free transform. Make that big. There we go. Rotate it a little, push it off the screen. Do the same thing here for the black square. Command + T for free transform, rotate, make it really big and slide it off screen. So now watch what happens when we go to the beginning and press play. We have a logo animation, and you see the pieces build and snap into place. If at any time you need to, you can adjust these, grabbing keyframes and moving them. You can also right click here and change the type of interpolation. So you can see there that you have linear interpolation or hold. Usually linear is going to work fine. So now as we watch this animation, you see the slight refinement and we slow down those elements and they come into play. Now don't worry if it doesn't play back smoothly initially, when you see gaps in here that indicates that they haven't been fully cashed, but on the second play through, it should look a lot smoother, and you'll get a pretty good idea of what your logo animation looks like. Once you're all done with your animation, you can simply choose file export, render video. Photoshop offers some pretty straightforward choices there, and you can set things like the file format and whether or not you want to include transparency.