Animating using Photoshop

I had never used photoshop to animate before so the lesson I had and the things I learnt were all new to me.

Using the flip books I made last week, I scanned in each page of one of my flip books. I scanned them in at 300 dpi so I was working with an image larger than its original size, which is quite small. 

I then opened each image into photoshop to edit them. For each image, I used the crop tool to set the dimensions I wanted to work with (landscape A4) to crop down and rotate the image so that I was working with the same dimensions with each image. I then used levels to make the image backgrounds a clear white and make the ball outline darker so it could be seen clearer. 

I then resized the image, changing the dpi to 72 instead of 300. 

To begin animating, I opened the images in Birdge, where I could select all the images I wanted, go to 'tools' - 'Photoshop' - 'load files to Photoshop layers', which is a quicker way off adding all the images into Photoshop. To add them into a timeline, I went to 'window' - 'timeline' and selected create frame animation, from here I could either add a new frame or because I had images in my layers I could select 'make frames from layers' and 'reverse' to add them to the timeline. 

To add colour I simply used the brush tool and the blending mode 'multiply' to add a bit of colour to each frame. when I was happy with the animation I save it for web to create this looping gif. 

The animation does however need more of an arc motion as this pretty much in a zig zag motion.