Advanced moving through space animation

This is not a guide for the very beginners of photoshop. If you're reading it, you should really be familiar with the basics. We will be creating a space scene and then we will create an animation as if we were flying through it. This is going to be a frame-by-frame animation so the end result will be a series of frames, that can be imported and used in any animation/video software. I will not show you how to do that, we will only generated the frames, needed for the animation. You will then be able to use ImageReady, Flash or other software to create the animation/video. As you'll see there's a bit of work to do for each of the frames and the process isn't very short. This is because we're making a frame-by-frame animation and doing the calculations ourselves. If we were to make a longer animation, this method would be very painful, but for a small animation like this one it will do. If you're planning to use ImageReady to create a final GIF, you might want to import the file and automate the animation process.

So let's begin. First of all, let's have a look at what we're trying to make:

It can be used as a banner or as an intro and it's pretty easy to make. Animation consists of 4 layers of space: white, green, red and blue. When we fly through it, we cross the white layer, then the red and finally the green, leaving us with a blue space backround and an intro text. Here's what layers we will need in our animation:

As you can see we have a black background at the bottom. On top of it we have a vortex layer (the squirly thing on the bottom right corner of the animation). Then there's our intro text. Above the text we have the blue space layer with a blending mode set to screen. This layer does not animate. It's only a static background that is very far away and looks like it is not changing while we move through the space. And then we have the green, red and white layers. You will have to make these yourself and stack them on top of each other with their blending modes set to screen. Below you will find information how to make a single color space layer. Use the same technique for all the other color layers. When stacking them on top of each other, make sure they don't look too ugly and if they do - mask some of their areas. As you can see my white space layer only takes the left side of the image, the red takes the right side etc. Blue and green looked kinda good together so only small areas of the green layer are masked. So create a new document with black background (mine is 1280px by 800px, you can always resize it if you only need a small animation) and continue reading.

Making the space

To make a single color space, create a new layer by clicking on a new layer button

in the layers panel. Fill it with black and give it the name of the color you'll be applying to it. I'll be creating the blue space so i'll name it blue. Now go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise .... If you're also making a wallpaper size animation like i did, you can use 25% gausian monochromatic values. Now hit CTRL+L to open levels configuration. Drag the leftmost slider to the right as shown below:

What this does is it gets rid of some stars and leaves the sky more clear and less starry. So drag the slider until you like the result and then click OK to confirm. Duplicate this layer with CTRL+J. Now go to levels configuration again. Do the same procedure with the leftmost slider. Only this time very few stars should remain. Press CTRL+T to transform the layer. On the top of Photoshop window you'll see a transformation settings panel. It looks something like this:

Change the values next to and letters to 200% or more and click on the apply button

on the right side of the settings panel. This makes the stars bigger. You can blur or sharpen them if you like. Press CTRL+E to merge this layer down with our blue layer. So now we have small stars and bigger ones on the same layer. Create a new layer above. Press D to default the color values and set background color to some sort of blue. Click on Filter > Render > Clouds. Now click on Filter > Render > Difference Clouds. Change the layer's blending mode to screen. If you don't like the result, press CTRL+F to repeat the Difference Clouds filter until you get something you like. Hit CTRL+E to merge it with the blue layer. Set the ]i blue[/i] layer's blending mode to screen and doubleclick on it to activate the layer style dialog. Find the blend if options on the bottom of this dialog.

Under this layer there's a slider and it consists of two little triangle-ish shapes. They're both connected, but we need to separate them. ALT+CLICK the right triangle of the slider as shown in the picture above and drag it to the right. While dragging, watch the changes in the picture. Keep dragging until you get satisfying results. This operation will decrease the ammount of blue space if you think there's too much of it. I had to do this for all color space layers. And that's it. You should have something like this by now:

Create two more layers in different colors and stack them on top of each other. Don't forget they must all have screen as the blending mode. Here's how my colored spaces look:

As you can see, i've chosen to add stars to only blue and red layers. You can do whatever looks better for you.

Making the vortex

Create a new layer and press D to default the color values. Click on Filter > Render > Clouds. Now click on Filter > Render > Difference Clouds. Change the layer's blending mode to screen. Now go to Filter > Distort > Twirl. For a wallpaper size image, use a 500-600 degree twirl. You should get something like this:

Using the soft brush tool

from the tools palette, paint the center in white. Press CTRL+T to transform the layer and drag the two top transformation points inwards holding the CTRL key as shown below:

Hit ENTER to apply. Now get the eraser tool (or mask the layer if you know how to) and delete the non-twirly areas with a soft brush. The result should be like the image below:

Duplicate the layer with CTRL+J and select the lower layer. Press CTRL+T and click on one of the corner transformation points. Holding SHIFT and ALT keys, drag the point to make the lower vortex bigger. Press ENTER to apply. Change the opacity of the lower vortex to 20 - 30 percent. Finally, merge the two vortex layers together. The end result:

Preparation

The last thing we need to do is create some sort of an object that will be flying towards us. I've used simple text, but you can use whatever you like. So create the object on a new layer and convert both it and the vortex to a smart object. To do this, select each of those layers and go to Layer > Smart Objects > Convert To Smart Object. You don't need to create a smart object for a vortex if you're not planning on animating it. In my example animation the vortex is not animated therefore does not require to be converted to a smart object. Smart object will allow us to downsize the text (or whatever object you have) layer and the original size won't be lost. When we scale it up in the animation, it won't pixelate and become ugly. So finally arange the layers like that:

Animation

For each frame we will do a series of transformations. That means you will have to press CTRL+T on an animating layer and write the appropriate scale values into the transformation settings panel. We will be creating a 18 frame animation. For every frame, white, green, red and text layers will be scaled up. For the first frame, select the object / text (i will call this text from now on) layer and with the help of CTRL+T downscale it to 7%. We will be increasing its size by 7% each frame. That's all we need to do for the first frame. Hit CTRL+A, CTRL+SHIFT+C and you have the first frame in the clipboard. You can paste it on another document and paste every other layer on top if you plan to export this to ImageReady or you can skip the CTRL+A, CTRL+SHIFT+C part and simply save the frame as a JPEG or BMP or whatever you like. Below there's a table of scale values for each animating layer. Quickly look through it and below you'll find a more detailed explanation.

Frame	White	Red	Green	Text
1	100%	100%	100%	7%
2	120%	105%	102%	14%
3	120%	110%	104%	21%
4	120%	115%	106%	28%
5	120%	120%	108%	35%
6	hidden	120%	110%	42%
7	hidden	120%	112%	49%
8	hidden	120%	114%	56%
9	hidden	120%	116%	63%
10	hidden	120%	118%	70%
11	hidden	hidden	120%	77%
12	hidden	hidden	120%	84%
13	hidden	hidden	120%	91%
14	hidden	hidden	120%	98%
15	hidden	hidden	120%	no change
16	hidden	hidden	120%, 66% opacity	no change
17	hidden	hidden	120%, 33% opacity	no change
18	hidden	hidden	hidden	no change

You've probably got scared after seeing all of these values :) Well they're not scary at all and if you think of importing the frames to ImageReady in the end, you might consider automating the scaling process as well. This way you won't need all of these values and the animation process will be relatively simple, but the purpose of this tutorial is to do it manually. Since there's lots of colors in our image, the GIF animation will probably not look so good therefore making the result as a series of frames allows them to be used in any animation software.
So let's have a look at the table and let me explain what everything means. Let's make a second frame together and you'll be able to make the other frames yourself. First we need to resize the white space layer. And we can see that for the second frame the white must be upsized to 120%. So select it, press CTRL+T and enter 120% to and fields in the transformation settings panel. Now let's move on to the red layer. We can see it has a 105% scale on the second frame. Scale it as you did with the white layer. Do the same with green and text layers. When all of this is done, you'll end up with the second frame of your animation. Save it or do whatever you like with it and move on to the third frame. If you see the word hidden in the table, it means the layer has to be hidden. In frames 16 and 17 the green layer must be upsized but there's also another operation that must be done: you need to change the opacity to 66% for the 16th frame and to 33% for the 17th frame.
When you do the scaling, you'll notice that everytime you press CTRL+T on a space layer, a 100% will be shown in the transformation settings panel and you'll have to change it to the value in the table. But if you press CTRL+T on a smart object layer, the previous value will be shown. That's because when you downsize a smart object, photoshop remembers how it actually looks like and knows that you've downsized it. And when you downsize any other layer, photoshop accepts the change as a new default size and thinks it's how the layer actually looks in a 100%. That's why when you try to scale a simple layer up again, it gets pixelated: photoshop simply lost all the original size information when you downsized it.

So good luck animating :)