Alex Grigg Photoshop Animation
As of 2024-07-17, the following video was available to view on Alex Grigg’s Vimeo and personal site:
We’ve preferred to use Photoshop in this way for awhile, but if we have to reinstall the application or have a lapse in memory these notes can be a life saver for getting up and running again quickly.
Getting the Gears Going
- Enable the timeline from the View menu.
- Once in view, click the hamburger menu to access the animation layers, then configure framerate and such as desired.
- Disable thumbnail in timeline for more space for editing in the timeline menu.
Drawing and Moving
Caution! Known Bug Shortcuts on timeline will only work once a layer is moved past the 0 time signature, otherwise they won’t work.
Layer Animation
The advantage of this style of animation is that it feels very flexible for straight-ahead animation and for keyframe driven animation. In a nutshell, the process is as follows:
- Create the illustration on a layer.
- Create a new layer over top and adjust the previous layer’s opacity level
- Create a new illustration on the new layer
- Repeat until layers become cumbersome to see together on screen (3~4 is usually where we break)
- Then, shorten the most recent layers in the timeline into the duration that illustration should remain in frame.
- Move the layer in the timeline to no longer overlap with the previous layers.
Keep adjusting the lengths and positions of the layers on the timeline to create the motion of the illustration changing between each layer. These steps become much easier to execute with the addition of shortcuts and with practice.
New Keyframe Opacity Trick
This nifty shortcut is available in most versions of Photoshop, and it allows us to control the visibility of the current active layer by pressing V and any of the 0 through 9 number keys. This supplements the inability to onion skin on the layers when they are first added to the timeline but haven’t been readjusted to no longer overlap. It also mitigates an issue where creating new layers fills the entire timeline that remains within the work area, which is a pain to constantly resize down to the appropriate amount of frames. Instead, by duplicating the layer we will retain the current layer’s duration into the new layer:
Duplicate layer → Select All → Delete all → Deselect
And now the new layer is the same size as original!
Video Layer Animation
Straight ahead animation is a great fit for this kind of layer animation, as you are animating on every frame. Inserting a blank frame will add a frame in the current timeline position and push the previous frames back and future frames forward to incorporate it. This can be frustrating due to the preview of layers not being visible, but can be modified to be easier to work with using shortcuts.
However, this approach doesn’t work well with the layer visibility trick done for previewing drawings and emulating onion skinning. As a result, it is necessary to be particular with how complex each drawing is to avoid getting bogged down with Adobe’s lackluster onion skinning options.
Onion Skin Layer Effect Tip
Multiply as an effect on Onion Skin settings typically works well most times. It will be a great fit for high contrast colors such as black on white but generally works when all of the lines and background have similar hues.
Video Layer Method
This approach takes a lot of inner visualization to imagine, but each layer will have a frame within the timeline. If no drawing is added to a frame then there will be nothing appearing within the composition when the playback line scrubs past it. One way to conceptualize this is to imagine the following table as if it were the timeline:
| Video Layer Name | 1f | 2f | 3f | 4f | 5f | … |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animation Layer (Layer Animation Group) | Drawing | Drawing | Drawing | |||
| Color Layer (Video Group) | Keyframe | Keyframe | Keyframe | Keyframe | Keyframe | Keyframe |
In the above example there are drawings on every other frame, and on the video layer we are able to quickly color in each frame, whether it is a keyframe or an in-between.
But in cases where it is required to fill in details every frame, such as adding clean up lines to an established motion in an animated scene, it can be an incredibly quick way to fill in details without interrupting the flow of drawing.
To make working in this way more bearable flexible, it is recommended to set the following actions up as hotkeys, which thankfully will only require setting a keybinding of your choosing to the corresponding action in the keybind tab within the settings menu.
Hotkeys Reference
New Blank Video Layer - Alt + Shift + Ctrl + B
- Overwrites Image → Adjustments → Black&White but not really something we use.
Insert Blank Frame - Ctrl + B
- Overwrites Image → Adjustments → Color Balance which doesn’t impact our workflows.
Duplicate Frame- Alt + Ctrl + B
Delete Frame - Shift + Ctrl + B
- Overwrites Image → Auto Color which we did not know even existed until setting this up a handful of times.
Video Groups
Can be used with video layers in order to organize them into sequence on a single track of the timeline.
When duplicated the timing will not be automatically adjusted and no action powered way to do this to date. This is why layer animation with shortcuts becomes much more attractive.
Shortcuts
Creating actions will allow for a series of transformations to boost the time to production for animating scenes in Photoshop. Within the settings menu there will be a section that can be updated with custom key mappings for associated actions in the application, such as creating a new video layer or toggling the color profile of the file.
Layer Method Shortcuts
Toggle Onion Skins
Change the shortcut in Keyboard Shortcuts → Panel Menu → Video → Enable Onion Skinning to Ctrl + Y.
By adding this specific combination of key combinations for the mapping we will remove the toggle color proofing mode shortcut. This isn’t that big a loss in our experience, but feel free to rebind it if its useful.
New Blank Keyframe - F2
Using this command will allow you to create a new layer with the same duration as the current selected layer, as well as mimic onion skinning by changing the opacity of these two layers so that the new active layer will be at full visibility and the previous layer will be lowered to 30% opacity.
V + 3 → Drag layer down to duplicate → Ctrl + A → Delete → Ctrl + D → V + 0
By mapping this specific function key to this action we will lose a way to perform the Cut operation, but this should be okay as we can use the more conventional Ctrl + X shortcut to achieve the same effect.
Breakdown of Steps
By pressing V + 3 we will set the current layer’s opacity to 30%.
Duplicate the current layer by dragging the layer down to the new layer button at the button of the layer pane in the UI. This duplication of the layer allows us to create a similar duration and opacity copy of the selected layer and make it the current active layer on the timeline.
We’ll then select everything with Ctrl + A
Remove all of the previous layer’s drawing by deleting it
Unselect everything with Ctrl + D
Then reset the opacity for the new layer to 100% by using V + 0
Moving the canvas to meet the line
F - Changes framing, R - allows for rotation, and both are useful for drawing lines on the composition
More clean-up of the drawing means an easier time when coloring as you’ll need to make less line adjustments farther into the process when effort has gone into previous drawings or areas of the composition.
Expand Fill - F3
This will fill a space that is already selected with a foreground color. This will only work on layers that are not in a video group.
Select → Modify → Expand (2 pixels, resolution will cause this amount of pixels to vary) → Alt + [ → Alt + Backspace → Alt + ] → Ctrl + D
By mapping this specific function key to this action we will lose a way to perform the Copy operation, but similar to the previous mapping we can use Ctrl + C shortcut to achieve the same effect.
Breakdown of Steps
Alt + ] moves the current selected layer to the layer below the one that was selected when this shortcut was used.
Alt + Backspace will fill the current selection with a color from the foreground color
Alt + ] moves the current selected layer back to the original layer when the shortcut was used
Then we deselect everything in the composition using Ctrl + D
Color Layer - F4
This will create a copy of the current layer, then move down a layer, remove everything, and switch back to the layer with the line art. This can be useful for when you want to color a frame and don’t want the hassle of matching the new color layer’s duration to match. This will only work on layers that are not in a video group.
Duplicate Layer → Alt + [ → Ctrl + A → Delete → Ctrl + D
And finally we will be overriding the Paste operation shortcut mapped to F4, but using the good ole fashioned Ctrl + V shortcut works just as well.
This does differ from the steps in the video, as we never could get the habit of remembering which layer is the active layer when the additional Alt + ] is used in Alex Grigg’s workflow. This wouldn’t be too bad if we remembered to lock our layers, but uh, believe or not we can’t remember to do that either.
So to mitigate the horrors of coloring over line art again and again, we prefer to be on the new color layer when this series of operations completes.
Breakdown of Steps
Duplicate the current layer by dragging the layer down to the new layer button at the button of the layer pane in the UI.
Move the current active layer to the one below it using Alt + [
Select everything in the composition with Ctrl + A
Remove everything with Delete
Deselect everything with Ctrl + D and remain on the new color layer to begin adding tones and different hues.
Universal Shortcuts and Tips
Playback Shortcuts
F7 - Move the playback line backward one frame
- Keyboard Shortcuts → Panel Menu → Video → Move Frame Backward
F8 - Split layer in timeline at playback line
- Keyboard Shortcuts → Panel Menu → Video → Split at Playhead
F9 - Move playback line forward one frame
- Keyboard Shortcuts → Panel Menu → Video → Move Frame Backward
General Tips
Enable auto-select for quick selection across layers
Move Tool → Enable Auto Select in settings
Color Lock with Coloring Tip
Enabling color lock when on a layer animation or will ensure that you are not removing any of the color tones that are on the composition. This allows for the removal of drafting lines or no longer required line definitions discovered later in the animation process.
Clipping Mask Animated Textures
Create Clipping mask out of a group of textured animation tones to constrain the animated texture layers to appear only on the areas of drawing or color tones below it within the layer pane in the user interface.
Animating on 1’s when on 24fps
Add some 1’s into a 24 frame animation by upping the framerate to 25 and then adding your new drawings in all the places where the flow of motion becomes disjointed after the change and the places where there was more desire to have tighter control of the flow of drawings.