Animation Types Part 2: Fading

This is the tutorial on the second type of animation in Photoshop. This will focus on how to animate text/images to fade from one slide to another.  It can get confusing so I'll try to explain it as well as I can. It is recommended that you view the Animation Basics Tutorial and/or the Animation Types Part 1 Tutorial before going on to this one because this is a continuation of the previous ones.

For this tutorial, I am starting out with a plain white background with a heart on one side and a star on the other. Both shapes are on separate layers so that they can be manipulated separately.

Open the animation palette as shown in the previous tutorials.

For the moment, there is one slide and both shapes are shown. Click the eye symbol next to the star layer in the layers palette so that the layer will not be visible on this slide.

Create a new slide, hide the heart layer as you did with the star and make the star layer visible by clicking the eye icon again. You should only see the star on this slide.

Set the time increment as desired on the two slides (see previous tutorial for instructions on how to do this). I used 2 seconds for each slide. Once that is done, use the "tween" as in previous tutorial. Leave everything on the default settings and click "Ok".

Now you will see that there are five more slides added to the palette. The Tween action added the new slides in between the two selected slides so that they will transition into each other smoother. I set the time increment of the new slides to 0.2 seconds.

Now, if done correctly, the heart will fade out as the star fades in when the play button is pressed. It should look like this.

If you are making a siggy and you want the animation to repeat over and over again, click on the dropdown box in the bottom left corner and choose "Forever" if it isn't already selected. If you don’t want it to repeat, choose "Once". 

To save your animation, go to File/Save for Web & Devices.

A window will pop up showing your animation slide by slide. There are several options to save it as(in a drop down box underneath the save, done and cancel buttons). I usually use the "GIF 128 dithered" because it is the best quality.

A little warning about gif images: they are HUGE files compared to jpgs or pngs. If you plan on uploading a lot to a photo-hosting site, you can use up your size limit really fast. From my experience, gifs will not upload to Tinypic or Imageshack, so I usually use Photobucket.  

Hopefully this wasn't too confusing for you guys. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.