- Animation in ImageReady
- Animation Terms
- Tweening with Opacity
- Selecting, Duplicating, and Reversing Frames
Selecting, Duplicating, and Reversing Frames
What if you wanted to make the words fade up, then hold, then fade out? This type of change is not only possible to do in ImageReady, but it’s easy once you know the steps.
1. With flower.psd still open from the previous exercise, click on frame 1 in the Animation palette. Hold your Shift key down and click the last frame. All the frames should be selected.
2. With all the frames selected, click on the New Frame icon at the bottom of the Animation palette. This duplicates all the selected frames and appends them to the end of the frames that were already there.
Tip: This technique doesn’t just offer a fast way to copy and paste, it’s also the only way to get the animation to copy and paste without generating new layers in the Layers palette.
3. Use the scroll bar at the bottom of the Animation palette, and you’ll see that the 12 frames you copied were just pasted at the end of the animation sequence. They should already be selected. Note: If you accidentally click off of them, you can use the Shift+Click method to reselect them. Click frame 13, hold your Shift key down, and click frame 23. This selects all the frames that you just duplicated.
4. Click the upper-right arrow again and select Reverse Frames. This puts all the selected frames in the reverse order.
5. Change the Once setting to Forever and click Play. You should see the animation fade up and down. Click Stop when you’re through admiring your handiwork.
6. Click on frame 12 and change the timing to 1.0 second, as shown above. Rewind the animation by clicking on the Rewind button at the bottom of the Animation palette. Click Play to watch the result of this change. The animation should now stop and hold in the middle and then continue to play. When you’re finished watching, click the Stop button.
You can change the timing of all the frames, or you can change the timing of individual frames.
This exercise taught you how to set the number of repeats with which an animation will play. You learned to create a loop by selecting, duplicating, and reversing frames, and how to set delays on individual frames.