Photobie Forum

odidio · Joined: 01 Mar 2006 Posts: 89 Location: N.S. Canada

Here is an explination on how I made my avatar animation.

First load the image you want to use into Photobie.
Next, in the layer manager choose the 'clone current layer' button. ( circled in screen shot ).

This will create new layers that are an exact match to your image and they will be centered over the others. It is impportant not to move any of the layers for this animation.
I clicked the clone button seven times for this animation, you now have eight frames all together, this includes the background one.

The 'background' layer will have no effect added, it's the starting point.

Select 'Layer 1' then filter and choose the water filter. The water filter window will appear, ( screen shot ).

Move the slider a small ammount to the right and click OK. You now have the first frame ready, the rest are done in the same manner.

Select the second layer / water filter / and move the slider to the right farther than you did for the first one. Click OK.

Select the third layer / water filter / move the slider only a small ammount to the right, click OK. This will make the animation look like it is comming back to the start.

Skip past layer four, it will be the same as the background one with no effect.

Select layer five / water filter / and move the slider a small ammount to the left. Click OK.

Select layer six / water filter / move the slider more to the left than you did with layer five. Click OK.

Select layer seven / water filter / move the slider to the left only a small ammount. Click OK. Again this will make the animation look like it's comming back to the starting position.

Now your layers are ready, open up the Animation control panel. Have a look at how your animation runs and adjust the delay time. ( screen shot ).

When your happy with your creation click on 'Save' and choose a location.

Using this same technique with different numbers of layers and filters you can get some nice animations. There are lots of combinations, here are a couple..............................

Sharpen filter,

Swirl filter,

Moire filter with a change in color balance,

Explore different combinations !!

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Cheng · Site Admin Joined: 11 Aug 2005 Posts: 104

Great tutorial,simple but nice effects, thanks Odidio

Jenrae5 · Joined: 19 Jun 2006 Posts: 2

I am having a really hard time with the animations. I read the previous posts. Where do you find 'layer 1' and so on? I don't get it, I need help, lots of it. I've never had this hard a time using photo software. Any help with animations would be greatly appreciated. I want to animate my own digital photos.

Thanks, Jennifer
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Jennifer

Jenrae5 · Joined: 19 Jun 2006 Posts: 2

After several tries...I can animate backgrounds. What I want to animate is my digital photos...like making a mouth move or a hand etc... Can I even do that with Photobie? Someone help......PLEASE!

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Jennifer

Cheng · Site Admin Joined: 11 Aug 2005 Posts: 104

Sure you can do it with Photobie easily.
When you check Photobie.com the baby smiling face animation was all done with Photobie only.

Please try follow process:
1. open your image into Photobie. (You may need to crop it first for better result). resize it if it is too big
2. clone the first layer for few times.
3. work on the new cloned layers for desired animation effect.
4. Then Photobie will automatically assembly the layers for animation.

Well, the main idea is that each layer in Photobie becomes an animation frame unless you hide it. And you can overlay the layers incrementally when check the additive mode in Animation Control.

Anyway, I will give a full example of how to do it very soon. or maybe Odidio can provide a better one.

odidio · Joined: 01 Mar 2006 Posts: 89 Location: N.S. Canada

Hello Jenrae5, sorry for the delay I was away.

This is one way, Cheng probably has a better way and I'll keep trying different ones.

That's a pretty tricky process if you just want a part of the picture to move like a hand waving or something. I tried a quick one with this beaver cartoon character to see if I could do it.

It turned out kind of shakey, but it brings up a possible feature to ask cheng for, hint hint, lol. :wink: I think he may need a ' select all ' option so when you paste a frame on top of another you can select the whole frame automatically 'select all' and then click 'move selection to center'.

Very quickly this is what I tried.
-I made a freehand selection around the hand.
-On the layer manager click copy selection.
-Go up to edit and paste as a new layer.
-Choose the solid pen and the matching color (outside the hand, or if you don't have a solid color copy an area close to the hand) what you want to do is hide the original hand, or whatever you are trying to animate. In mine I chose white and painted over the original hand.
-Move the copied hand into the spot where the old one was and save this to your computer as 'picture #1.jpg' or whatecer you want to name it.
-Go back to Photobie and move the hand a little bit to where you want it and save as 'picture #2.jpg' In my case I rotated it 45 degrees then moved it to where it looked right. Keep moving and saving until you have all the movement you want. In my third one I rotated the hand to 315 degrees and moved it into place. This way I have three seperate pictures with the hand moving from side to side.

-Close Photobie and reopen, find your first 'picture #1.jpg' and open it.
-Open the second picture, copy it using the layer manager then click on the first picture and paste the new layer. Close the 'picture #2.jpg.
-You should have two layers now, the #1 picture and the #2 picture on top of it. Here's the tricky part, you have to try and move the second layer (picture#2) so that it's right on top of the first. Do this with all the pictures you saved for your motions.

I haven't done too many like this with Photobie so I'll keep trying new ways and maybe Cheng's method will be easier or quicker. It all depends on how much movement you want.

Hope I helped.

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odidio · Joined: 01 Mar 2006 Posts: 89 Location: N.S. Canada

I tried a little different way and it turned out better. You'll have to experiment a little though to get what you want for your picture.

Load in the beaver picture and select the area around the hand with the free hand selection.
On the layer manager click on 'copy layers selected region'.
Click on the screenshots to see them larger.

Make sure the 'auto layer generation' is not checked and color over the hand in the original with white to match the background color.
Now go up to 'Edit' and 'paste as new layer' to get your copied hand back on the picture.
Move the hand down into position.

Now on the layer manager select the 'background' image and click the 'clone current layer' . Do the same with the hand, clone it. You should now have 4 layers. Try not to get confused with the numbers assigned to the layers, the 'background' is considered a layer too.
Select the fourth layer (the second hand,) rotate 45 degrees and move into position.

Now select and put check marks in layers three and four and then with the merge choose the 'merge keep' option. Now you will have a new layer with the two that you checked as one. You can now delete the ones you had checked, leaving you with the backgroung and hand like you had at the start and the one you just made.

Now you have to repeat the process again, clone the background and clone the hand. Rotate the hand 315 degrees and move into position.
Put check marks beside the two clones you just made and again ' merge keep'. Like before get rid of the two clones now, you don't need them anymore.
You should now have the background and hand originals still there and the two layers you just made by merging.

Now it's time to put checks beside the background and hand that are still there and again 'merge keep'. Delete the leftovers, the hand and the background. You should be left with just three layers that you made.

You can now touch up the three final pics ( move them forward and back to see them) and go to the Animation controls and adjust/save.
If you zoomed in to work on the picture be sure to zoom back before you go to the animation controls.

It sounds complicated but after some experimenting and practice it gets easier, lol, I've just started trying out these different ways to get the animation I want, and I bet cheng will have an easier and different way.

So after all that my beaver got a little better, lol.

:wink:
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Cheng · Site Admin Joined: 11 Aug 2005 Posts: 104

Thanks Odidio :D

The second approach you made is exactly what I meant to do. layer clone and "merge keep" are exact tool for making animation easy.
I bet you must enjoy making this beaver animation with new tricks.

Haven't get time to visit GraphicsPlayground for a while, I am now working very hard on making a adapter for Photobie to use thousands of free Photoshop Filter plugins.

Once I succeed, Photobie users will be able to add all kinds of filter effect to their images and can create all kinds of animations easily.

So don't get disappointed when you see no new release for such a long period. I am working on it.

odidio · Joined: 01 Mar 2006 Posts: 89 Location: N.S. Canada

Yea that second way is pretty easy, it's fun to experiment with different ideas.

That should be realy cool, using plugins with Photobie.

Hope your having some luck Jenrae5.

:D
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cabinbound · Joined: 03 Jul 2006 Posts: 1

I just downloaded this program today. Here are my notes for making the simplest, no-frills animated-GIF possible from a sequence of photos. (These are instructions for Windows XP and Photobie 2.6.)

1) Let's say you have a sequence of photos, call them photo1.jpg through photoX.jpg, that they're all the same size, and the size is 320 wide x 240 tall. (If the size is not 320 x 240, we will resize the photos to 320 x 240 in step 4b.) (Possible bug?: I tried this with four 640 x 480 photos and Photobie crashed in step 8.)

2) Start Photobie.

3) Click "File", "New", set "Width" to 320, set "Height" to 240, Click "Ok". This is where you will build the animated GIF. (I am calling this "the New GIF" here).

4) To add each photo from photo1.jpg through photoX.jpg to the sequence:

4a) Click "File", "Open", "Image". This will open a new window.

4b) Pick the directory the photo is in; find the photo, click on the photo, click "Open". (To resize a 640 x 480 photo to 320 x 240, click "Image", "Resize Layer Image", set "Width" to 320", if necessary set "Height" to 240.)

4c) Move the cursor to the window with the photo you just loaded and click (to make sure that this is the photo to be operated on).

4d) In the "Layer Manager", click the "Copy Current Layer" icon.

4e) Move the cursor to the New GIF and click.

4f) In the "Layer Manager", click the "Paste Copied Layer" icon.

5) In the "Layer Manager", click the layer marked "0:Background".

6) Under "View Settings", click "Hide", then set it to "True" via the drop-down menu.

7) Click "GIF_Animation", "Animation Control Panel". A new window will appear, the "AnimationPanel".

8) In the "AnimationPanel", click "Refresh". Click "Start". In five seconds or so, the sequence should start animating.

9) Click "Stop".

10) To save this animated GIF: in the "AnimationPanel", click "Save". A new window will appear. Pick the name of the file and where to put it, and click "Save".

NOTE: This gives you a border halfway around the animated GIF -- the left side and the top are white. I don't know how to fix that.

There is a lot more to it of course. You can change the order of the frames for example but that's another matter.

(Possible bug?: Clicking the "Move Current Layer Down Back" icon in the "Layer Manager" crashes Photobie!)

Cheng · Site Admin Joined: 11 Aug 2005 Posts: 104

Hi, Cabinbound,

Thanks a lot for your quick animation tutorial and bug report.

Yes, there is a bug associate with shuffling layers up and down. I just published a new release 2.6.1. which address that bug as well as others.
I wonder whether you hit this bug using 2.6 or 2.6.1. If you are using 2.6, please try to download 2.6.1 at download.com or softpedia.com or from quick link:
[url] http://www.photobie.com/Download/PhotobieInstaller.exe[/url]

Regarding the crash on animation with four 600*480 is due to the memory and other contraint on some lower configuration PC. Animation with big images really consume lots of memory and computation. My program is currently based on Microsoft .NET Framework, which can't handle it very well at this moment. However, I expect some fix with new .NET Framework soon.

Thanks again for your contribution.

--Cheng

odidio · Joined: 01 Mar 2006 Posts: 89 Location: N.S. Canada

Yup that works.

I got one to work at 640x480 ( 4 frames) they were simple colored frames with a little text but it was 1.12 Mb when saved.

The border on the left and top.

This happenes when you paste your copy onto the background. The pasted layer always goes a little to the right and down. What you can try is pulling the frame of the window around the pics out a little so you can see the edges and then move your pasted layers into position. It's pretty tricky to get them exactly on top of one another.
( click images for larger view )

Thats what I tried for the first Beaver, there would have to be a way select all and center or have the layer centered automatically.

Here's a bit of a trick though, make your 'New' white backgroung larger than your pictures you want to use in your animation.
In this one I started with a white background at 420x320.
I resized the large pics I was using to 400x300 and copy pasted them to the white background. Then when you hide the background it will be transparent.

Here's the ani ( I cut it down in size for here.) The background/border is still there (the dimensions) but transparent.

:D
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Cheng · Site Admin Joined: 11 Aug 2005 Posts: 104

Wow, Odidio,
You just showed me another Tricky Trick. I have to admit you are the real Animation Pro. You have more secret tricks than I have. What else do you have, bring it on :wink: