How to make stop-motion animation in Photoshop

You don’t need a movie mode function on your digital camera to make a motion picture. In fact, you don’t even need additional movie-editing software, such as Adobe Premiere.

For this simple photography project we’ll show you how to use nothing more than your digital camera and Photoshop CS to put together a simple stop-motion animation sequence, then save it as a QuickTime movie. And seeing as today is Easter, we thought what better subject than to melt a chocolate Easter Bunny!

Using the basic principles of animation, we’ll take a series of images using our DSLR’s Interval Timer set to take a shot automatically every seven seconds, while the chocolate bunny is slowly melted by a hair dryer.

After making some global tweaks to all the captured JPEG images in Adobe Camera Raw, we’ll use the often-overlooked Image Sequence check box in Photoshop’s Open window to merge them all together into a movie that can be rendered and saved as a file that you can share quickly and easily.

The chocolate bunny we’ve used here works a treat, because the melting process is fairly fast, but there are many subjects that will work just as well. Try recording the movement of a bunch of flowers opening over several days, or shoot a sequence during a long walk. Want to see how it’s done? Watch the video below.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2012 at 9:30 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.