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Good Afternoon!

My problem is a bit complex, so this I'm going to break it into some topics:

screenshot of the projectenter image description here

My project: The project consists in a static background overlayed by some imagery elements and a gif (the blue/purple circle is a gif).

The problem: However, I'm having problems editing the overlaying images (the girl's render, for example). Whenever I try to edit any element aside from the gif - adding a shadow to the render on f(x) for instance, which is my current issue - only one frame is modified, and the other frames remain the same.

What I've tried so far: The obvious solution I thought of was selecting all the frames at once, holding shift. However, that only solved my problem partially. (when I tried to paste new elements to the composition and move them around).

The other solution I came up with, based on my previous experience, was to copy the whole static elements and paste them into a new project, editing what I wanted to edit onto the new tab and pasting the whole thing into the gif project again. Everything worked fine up until now. Then I decided to add some shadow to the render image. Things went downhill again.

With shift pressed, I selected all frames and clicked on the render to add a shadow. However, the only frame that was modified was the one that was visible. I then decided to add shaddow to the single image manually. Started from frame 2 to 15. When I clicked on frame 1, everything reseted. After I added the shadow to frame 1, I clicked on frame 2 anda the f(x) shadow was gone! Same thing to the remaining 13 frames!

I copied all the background and pasted on a new layer without the shadow thing and added the shadow there. Pasted back and, surprise: same issue. Only the the visible frame had the shadow (even though I had selected everything at once).

Combining all the gif layers into a smart object didn't work either...

The strange fact is that the render's white outline (check the screenshot), which is also a f(x) feature, worked just fine! (with the copy-and-paste-into-a new-project solution)

Am I missing something or is my photoshop bugging?

Thanks in advance

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1 Answer 1

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When you make a gif, every frame is a single image with different settings in the layers palette. Therefore, you need to create the image in the layers palette and then create the frames and animate it.

So basically you're working backwards. First create the image, add all the shadows and effects you need and then animate it.

Also, if you want to add a shadow on all those different frames it will be very long to make sure it animates smoothly along with the existing movement.

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  • That's a great idea! I haven't thought of that before because I already had my gif prepared before (I simply converted a video into a gif) and I assumed I just had to add that gif to a canvas. I'm going to try that and close the topic if I succeed.
    – Perhappiness
    Feb 7, 2018 at 1:19
  • It depends of what you're trying to do; if you want to modify an existing video, After Effects might be a better tool for the job, and then you can convert it to a gif at the end. If you stick to Photoshop, keep the end result in mind just visualise the frame/layers relation and what changes that entails so that you can figure out the most logical way to get there.
    – BenoitLussier
    Feb 7, 2018 at 3:43
  • That's true. In the end, I just shaped the whole background to my liking and created a image for each frame and gathered everything up in the end. Very unimpressive, because I could do that with any other editing program, like photoscape. I expected photoshop to be a more intuitive program for gif edits... I guess there's still a long way to go in that aspect, no program is perfect after all. Therefore, I consider this topic closed. Thank you for your kind help!
    – Perhappiness
    Feb 7, 2018 at 21:07
  • You're welcome! You are right in saying that the animations options are somewhat basic in Photoshop, but when you add actions and scripting on top of all the Photoshop tools you can achieve pretty impressive results. Also, you are using CS6 which came out in 2012. The new versions add a lot of animation options up to 3D animation, but other software in the Creative Suite such as After Effects will always be better for such a task.
    – BenoitLussier
    Feb 7, 2018 at 22:27

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