In this Photoshop® tutorial, we will be creating a fade in/out tween animation in Photoshop. In the previous tutorials, we prepared the graphics, added the text and set up the Timeline panel for our animation. If you have not done this, see the link at the end of the tutorial.

View Animation

At this point, we have the first frame of our animation, which has the stars and the Create! text visible. Now we will fade out the stars and the Create! text. At the same time, we will fade in the Watch text.

1. Open your CreateAnimation working file in to Photoshop.

Our first step is to duplicate the first frame. This duplicate will become the first frame of the fade in/out tween.


2. Select the first frame on the Timeline. Next, click the plus icon at the bottom of the Timeline panel to create a duplicate frame.

At this point, the Delay time of the new frame is 2 seconds. We need to reduce this to .1 seconds.


3. In the Timeline, select the second frame and set the Delay time to .1 seconds.

On this frame of the animation, we need the word Create! to remain visible, for now. We can do this by keeping the layer opacity for the Create! layer at 100%.

Next, we need to add the ending frame for the fade in/out animation. We will do this by duplicating the second frame.

Then, for this third frame, we will set the Opacity for the Watch layer to 100% and the Opacity for the stars and Create! layers to zero.


4. In the Timeline panel, duplicate the second frame (see screenshot).


5. With the third frame selected and in the Layers panel, change the Opacity for the Create! layer to zero.


6. Repeat this for the stars layer.


7. Set the Opacity of the Watch layer to 100% (see screenshot).

Finally, we are ready to create the tween animation, which we will set to five frames. Photoshop will create five in-between frames for the changes in opacity that will hide and show the Create!, stars and Watch layers. These in-between frames is what creates the tween animation.


8. Select both the second and third frames on the Timeline panel. From the bottom menu, click the Tweens button. In the Tween window, set the following and Click OK (see screenshot).

Tween With: Selection
Frames to Add: 5

You should now have eight frames on the Timeline (see screenshot). Now we will duplicate the last frame on the Timeline and set the Delay to 2 second. This will gives us a nice pause before the next animation begins.


9. Select frame 8 on the Timeline and click the Duplicate button (plus icon) on the bottom menu. This will give us frame 9. Set the Delay to 2 seconds on frame 9.


10. Click the Play button on the bottom menu to test your animation.

The animation should begin with the word Create! and the stars visible on the canvas. After 2 seconds, the word Create! and the stars should fade out and the word Watch should fade in.


11. Save your work.

In the next tutorial, we will create another tween animation.

Index - Photoshop Frame Animation

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