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In this tutorial you will learn how to animate your pictures using Photoshop CS3. If you have CS2 or lower you can access Image Ready and do the same technique. Regardless how you do it result should be similar to this:

This is the image I am going to use for this tutorial. After you will learn how to animate your pictures it will be easy to animate almost all pictures, but keep in mind that you will have to save the images as GIF – so you will lose many details from your photos.

And now let’s make the flames dance!

Step 1

Open the image in Photoshop. You can see that the image has too much black in it. Remove some of it using Crop Tool (C). After you make the selection press Enter.

Step 2

Duplicate the background layer.
Take the Smudge Tool (R) - you will find it under the Eraser Tool, set the Hardness to 0%. You can see in the image below the difference between 0% and 100% when using this tool.

Set the Master Diameter to ~ 70px, put the brush over the flame, hold down the mouse, click and drag a little to the left side, lower the Master Diameter, put the brush a little higher then before, drag a little to the right side, and so on until you think is OK.

Duplicate the background layer again and put it above all the others. Take the Smudge Tool and do the same as before.

In this way make as may layers as you want.

Step 3

And now let’s animate!
Go to Window – Animation. See in the picture below what will happen when you do that.

Go to the top-right corner of the menu, click on the little arrow and select Convert to frame animation.

What you will see is this:

Step 4

Deselect the visibility to the layers and leave only the background layer visible.

Doing the way you see in the picture below you will set the time that the frame will be visible on the slide. Play with that and see how it works. I chose 0.2 sec.

Step 5

It’s time to make a new frame. Press the little icon that says Duplicates selected frames

Photoshop will duplicate the initial frame. Go to Layers Palette, deselect the background layer and select the first layer above it.

Repeat step 5 until you have all your layers in the slide.

Step 6

Click on the arrow that’s on the Once button and select Forever in order for your slide to repeat on and on. Choose Other if you want to set yourself how many times it will play the slide.

Step 7

Save your animation as GIF and...

Result

enjoy the result :)