Dec 24

Hey Guys, Today I’ve brought a beautiful animated magical scene a photo shop tutorial for you, something a bit different from making a website or designing.

In this animated Photo shop tutorial, we’re going to make Santa sleigh with his rein deers fly over a fantasy winter land and we’ll add some magic of our own to it too. How’s that sound? I’m sure you’ll love this animation and would want to try it.

Click on the demo button to see a full size final result!

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Have a look at the final scene before starting.

So, without wasting any more time let’s begin our photo shop tutorial with the requirements for our project.

Things we need:

Photoshop CS5, winter scene wallpaper, Santa sleigh image, Photoshop Star brushes.

Required time:

25 to 35 minutes.

Level: Basic

Let’s begin our magical journey of photo shop tutorial!

Step 1:

Open up Photoshop CS5 and then open the wallpaper of winter scene. Double click on the wallpaper layer to make it a working layer.

Step 2:

Now open up the Santa sleigh picture and cut out the Santa sleigh using Quick selection tool (w).

Step  3:

Now paste the cut out Santa sleigh on our winter scene. You can place it in the middle because we’re going to move it anyway.

Step 4:

Now go to the Image tab and select Adjustments and then select Brightness/Contrast. Make the setting according to the picture given below.

Step 5:

Now create another layer and select a round brush of size 6 with white color # ffffff and make some magical stars or dots (if you like) behind the Santa sleigh. You can use star shape or snow flack shape brush too as I did. As shown below.

Step 6:

Now create another layer and select a round, star, and snow flack shape brushes of size 6 pixel with light sky blue color # 00ffff. Now make some more stars or dots o fairy dust (whatever you want to call it).

Step 7:

Now Right click on both the layer and go to Blending options and select Outer glow. Make the opacity 100%, Size 21px and spread 6%. This will add the magical light to out fairy dust falling behind Santa sleigh.

Step 8:

Now make a group of Santa layer and stars layers. So you can move them all at once. To group the layers select the layers by clicking on the first and then pressing shift while clicking on other layers then go to Layer tab, go to new and select group from layers.

Step 9:

Okay, now the animation part of our photo shop tutorial starts. Go to the Window tab in Photoshop and check on Animation. You’ll have a portion below in your Photoshop as shown in the picture given below.

Step 10:

In the animation strip you can see first frame already. So in order to make our Santa magical ride fly over the scene we will make frames of the movement and then play them with a time set.

Step 11:

So, let’s start from the beginning and make our very first frame as we want it. We’ve got our first frame already but to make it as we want, place the Santa sleigh group at the far left corner of our winter scene (only one reindeer is showing). This will be our first frame. As shown below.

Step 12:

Now, place the Santa sleigh a little further (showing more rein-deers now) and click on the “Duplicate selected frames” button present in the animation strip to make our 2nd frame.

Step 13:

Same way make 3rd frame. Place Santa sleigh a little farther than before and click on the “Duplicate selected frames” button.

Step 14:

Keep on placing Santa sleigh farther and farther (like it’s flying over the scene) and keep clicking on the “Duplicate selected frames” button to make more frames. For this animation I’ve made 55 frames to make Santa completely fly over our winter scene. As shown below.

Step 15:

Now if you look at a single frame, at the bottom there’s time written. In our case, it is set 0.2 sec per frame but as we have a lot of frames and we want to make the movement smooth I’m going to set the time of each frame to 0.1 Sec by clicking on the bottom of each frame.

Step 16:

Okay, now the final step is to make Santa fly over and over again, I’ve set the “Looping option” to “Forever”.

Step 17:

Now to save it as a moving image, go to File and select “Save for web & Devices”, as shown below.

Step 18:

Save the file in GIF and make the setting as shown in the picture below.

After that you’ll have a moving image of Santa riding on his sleigh with his reindeers over a beautiful winter scene, same as shown below.

Hope you had as much fun making it as I did instead of making a website. Do share your experience and stories. Until next time, do try this photo shop tutorial and have a very happy Christmas, Cheers.

About the author: Shaina

Shaina is the co-founder and Chief Editor of Websoulz. She is a full-time writer/designer. And has been writing articles and tutorials for the designer community. If you want to connect with her, simply follow her on twitter @websoulz

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