I found this wonderful tutorial a few years ago and still use it today.
I did not create this tutorial, come up with this idea, and claim no ownership of the content. I am merely sharing it for all of you to enjoy! Here is the original page this tutorial came from.
This tutorial requires Paint Shop Pro (free trial download) and Animation Shop 3 (free trial download)
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To start out you will need Jasc's picture tube called "Little Lights". With Jasc's permission you can download the Little Lights tube here (simply unzip to the folder where your other tubes are kept), or you can get the entire Holiday Tube Pack on Jasc's Picture Tube Download Page (this link was updated Dec., 2004). Begin wih a new image: Width: 500 Height: 300 Background color: white 16.7 million colors Add a new layer and name it 'Strand' Set your foreground color to a nice deep green. I used: 62, 92, 62 (PSP7: this is Stroke color, set fill color to none) Now select the Draw tool and enter the following settings: First tab: Type: Freehand Line Style: Stroked Width: 5 Antialias: checked On the second tab set the Curve tracking to 10 and select the rounded cap in the center (See screenshots 1 and 2)   Screenshots 1 and 2 Draw a slightly wavy line across your canvas. (See screenshot 3)  Screenshot 3 Use the Inner Bevel to give your strand some depth: Image | Effects | Inner Bevel (PSP7: Effects | 3D Effects | Inner Bevel) Choose 'Round' from the presets and change the Shininess to 30 (See screenshot 4)  Screenshot 4 Add a new layer, but this time don't worry about giving it a name. Select the Little Lights tube and change the scale factor to 50 On your new layer, place one of the little lights and use the Mover tool to place it on the strand. (See screenshots 5 and 6)  Screenshot 5  Screenshot 6 If the light is facing the wrong direction or if you don't like the angle of the light, you can use Image | Flip, Image | Mirror, or Image | Rotate to help you position it better. Add another layer and repeat the same steps that you followed to place the first light. Putting each light on its own layer makes it much easier to position and re-position the lights until you are happy with their placement. Continue adding new layers until you have as many lights on your strand as you like, however, to keep everyone working on the 'same page' so to speak, try to use at least one or two lights from each of the colors in the tube: green, red, blue, and yellow (See screenshot 7)  Screenshot 7 When you are finished adding lights, turn off visibility for the Background layer and for the Strand layer (all of your little lights should still be visible). With one of your layers of lights active, go to Layers | Merge | Merge Visible and rename the merged layer 'Original'. Turn the visibility back on for your Strand and background layer. Ok, now we're going to turn some of the lights on. In your layer palette, right-click on your layer named 'Original' and choose duplicate. Rename your duplicate layer 'Green' To keep things simple we are going to make our lights flash according to color, but later you could make chasing or strobing lights, etc. Turn off the visibility of your Original layer. Make sure your Green layer is active. Choose the Freehand tool (the lasso) with the following settings: Selection type: Freehand Feather: 0 Antialias: checked (See screenshot 8)  Screenshot 8 Draw a nice large selection around the glass part of your first green light. If you have more than one green light on your strand, hold the Shift key down and draw a selection around the rest of the green ones as well. Try not to include too much of the base or parts of any other lights in your selection, but if you get some of the strand, don't worry because it's on a different layer. (See screenshot 9)  Screenshot 9 Go to Color | Adjust | Brightness/Contrast and set the brightness to 60 and contrast to 0. Click OK. Deselect all. (Selections | Select None). Go to File | Save Copy As and save it as frame-1.psp (this will eventually be the first frame of your animation). Now, back in the image that is still open in PSP, turn the visibility off for the Green layer and duplicate your Original layer once more. Rename this duplicate layer to the next color that you will turn on (for my strand that color was red, so I renamed this layer 'Red'). Turn the visibility off for the Original layer. With your Freehand tool select all of your red lights and adjust the brightness and contrast with the same settings we used before. Deselect all and go to File | Save Copy As and this time save the copy as frame-2.psp Follow the same steps for the blue lights and the yellow lights: 1. Turn off visibility for all previous color layers. 2. Duplicate the Original layer. 3. Rename your new duplicate layer. 4. Turn off visibility for Original layer. 5. Select all bulbs you want turned on. 6. Adjust brightness. 7. Deselect all. 8. Save copy of image. Ok, we are now ready to animate! From the File menu, choose Run | Animation Shop. Animation Shop has a number of different ways that it can handle layered files. For example: you have the choice of loading each layer within your .psp image as a separate frame, or you can choose to load each .psp image as one frame. (Only the parts of the .psp image that were visible when it was last saved will be visible when you open it as a frame in AS.) To make sure your layered .psp files don't open separate frames for each layer, click on File | Preferences | General Program Preferences. Click on the tab for Layered Files and choose 'Merge layers into a single frame'. (See screenshot 10)  Screenshot 10 Click on the icon for Animation Wizard. (See screenshot 11)  Screenshot 11 The first screen asks you how you want to determine the dimensions of your animation; we want all frames to be the same size as the first image, so mark the top radio button and click Next. The second screen asks about the background; for this tutorial choose Opaque, then right-click on the color swatch and select white as your background color. Click Next. The third screen will determine how your animation will be made if your source images have different aspect ratios. Since all of our frames are exactly the same size, we don't have to worry about any of these choices, so simply click Next. The fourth screen gives you the option of having your animation run indefinitely or you can choose to have it run a set number of times and then stop. For our flashing lights we want to choose 'Yes, repeat the animation indefinitely'. The next question lets you specify how long each frame will be visible before it is replaced by the next one. For now let's set it at 15, which means that each frame will be visible for 15/100s of a second. We can always adjust this number later if we want to make it run faster or slower. Click Next. In the fifth screen you will tell the program which images you want to use to build your animation. Click on Add Image Now you need to find the directory where you saved your frame-1, frame-2, frame-3, and frame-4.psp images. When you find your frame images, click once on the frame-4.psp and then shift-click on the frame-1.psp and choose Open. This will put your images in order in your animation. (See screenshot 12)  Screenshot 12 Click Next and then click Finish. Now you will see each individual frame in your animation. First off, let's crop it down to size a bit. In your first frame use the Crop tool from your Tool Palette to select the area that you want to crop; just like you would in PSP. Notice that each frame is being cropped to exactly the same size as the first one where you made your selection. When you are satisfied with the area you want to crop, click on the Crop button in your Style bar (in between the Menu bar and the Toolbar.) Now let's see what your animation will look like in motion. Click the View Animation icon in your Toolbar. (See screenshot 13)  Screenshot 13 Our lights should be twinkling along quite merrily, however if you think they're twinkling too fast or too slow, this is how you can change the speed: First go ahead and close your running animation by clicking on the View Animation icon again, or by clicking on the X in the upper right corner of the window where the animation is playing. Now go to Edit | Select All (this is important because you want each frame to display for a like amount of time, in other instances you might want to adjust the time for each frame separately). Go to Animation | Frame Properties and you will be able to change the Display time. When you are satisfied with your animation you will save it as a .gif. However, when you save it, you will be given some more options which will affect the image quality and the file size of your final image. Click on the Save icon in your Toolbar. In the screen Animation Quality Versus Output Size, you can move the slider towards Better Image Quality or towards Smaller File Size. My personal preference is to always leave it closest to Better Image Quality, but you might want to experiment with all these options on your own to find what works best for your particular animation. Click Next and you will see the Optimization Progress. Click Next when the different categories have finished and you will see approximate download times for your animation. If what you see is acceptable, click Finish and your animation is done! Example: This wreath with the chasing lights was made entirely of Jasc tubes and consists of 3 frames. |
