Animated Forum Signature Tutorial - By Reborn

Hey everybody, I was recently asked to write a tutorial on how to animate a signature, so I thought I'd share how I do it. I'll try to include as much information as possible, but I will most likely miss out something so if you have any questions feel free to ask. The tutorial will only include the animation side of the signature, if you would like to see a tutorial on the actual signature just let me know Before I get in to the tutorial, I will say that I'm not sure if this will be possible for all versions of Photoshop. I am using a copy of CS6 and it works for me, but I'm not sure about previous versions.

Anyway, on to the tutorial.

Step 1:
Find an animation fitting to your signature.

The base signature for this tutorial is very sci-fi-esque. Because of this, it made sense to use a space animation. I took the animation from a free footage channel on youtube, downloaded it using a youtube downloader and converted that footage in to a .gif using a gif website (I use ezgif.com, but you can use whatever site you prefer). This is the video I used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi5-YrAEChc



Step 2:
Open the .gif animation file and .png/.jpg file of your base signature in Photoshop.

Pretty self explanatory, the gif file should have many layers which are all hidden except one. These are the frames of the animation



Step 3:
Open up the timeline

Go to the top of the screen and click Window > Timeline


On the .gif file, you should see numerous frames and the word forever. This will make the animation loop forever as opposed to just playing once.


Step 4:
Select the section of the animation that you want to add to your signature and copy those frames.

Starting on the first frame you would like to start your selection from, while holding down the shift button click the final frame of your animation. If you want to select the entire animation, you can click the button in the top right corner of the timeline window and click 'Select All Frames'. After you have made the selection, click this button and click 'Copy Frames'.



Step 5:
Go to your base signature and create a timeline.

Click on your signature that you want to add the animation to and click 'Create Video Template'.



Then click the 'Convert to frame animation button' in the bottom left corner.



You should now be on a similar window to your .gif, but with only one frame (most likely lasting for 5 secs) and saying 'Once' as opposed to forever.

Step 6:
Change the loop option to 'Forever' and the delay option to match animation.

Click the drop down arrow next to 'Once' and select 'Forever'. Next to '5 sec' change the delay to whatever the delay is on your animation. You may need to click 'Other' and type the delay in if it isn;t there by default.


Step 7:
Paste frames of animation.

Click the button at the top right corner of the 'Timeline' window and select Paste Frames...'. Select 'Paste over Selection' and click ok.


Step 8:
Put the animation in to it's own group.

At the bottom of the 'Layers' window, select the folder icon to make a new group. Select the newly added layers (making sure you do not select the base signature) and drag them in to the group. You should now have only two layers.





Step 9:
Change the layer style.

Click the button at the top right corner of the 'Timeline' window and click 'Select All Frames'. Select the Group containing your animation in the Layers window and Click the drop down arrow next to 'Normal'. You should see many options, and I encourage you to experiment with them, but for the purpose of this tutorial I would recommend using Lighten, Screen or Linear Dodge. Which you should use depends on the animation ad base signature.

Step 10:
Resize and replace your animation.

While selecting the Animation group, type ctrl + T. Resize the animation how you see fit, holding down shift to maintain the aspect ratio. move the group by dragging it in place. Once you are done resizing and placing the animation, click the tick and the top of the Photoshop window.

Now, for the most part we are done with the tutorial and for many animations, this is all that will need to be done. The following steps are just things that can be done to make the animation blend in better to the signature.

Step 11:
Create a Layer Mask for the animation.

While selecting the animation group in layers, click the icon to the right of 'Fx' in the bottom of the 'Layers' window to create a layer mask. This is how we will change the opacity of the animation. While the Layer mask is selected, painting over signature in black hides a part of the layer while painting in white makes that part reappear. Painting in a grey colour reduces the opacity, depending on how dark/light the grey is. Using a soft brush, while the layer mask is selected, paint the Layer so that animation blends better in to the background. I would recommend painting in black over the render and text and border.



Layer Mask is selected:


Layer Mask is not selected:


Step 12:
Add Adjustment layers.

This step is up for experimentation, as there are many different adjustment layers which do interesting things. Create your Adjustment layer of choice selecting the half black, half white circle at the bottom of the 'Layers window'. Right click this newly created layer and select 'Create clipping Mask', making sure that it is above the Animation group. This will make it so the adjustment layer only affects this group and not the signature below. Adjust the settings to your liking. These layers come with a Layer Mask already and is selected by default, so brushing in black and white will have the same effects as they did with the layer mask for the animation group. Brushing in different shades of grey is how I would recommend changing the opacity, as this will affect all of the the frames as opposed to the current frame that you are selecting in the Animation window.

Adjustment layers I would suggest experimenting with are 'Brightness and Contrast', 'Gradient maps' on different Layer Styles and 'Hue and Saturation'.



Final Step
Save as a .gif.

Go to 'File > Save for Web'. Make sure that the file type is a .gif, the animation is looping forever and that the quality is decent. There will be a noticeable reduction in quality to cut down the file size. Click save and name it.

And there we go. Hopefully that should clear a few things up for anybody who wants to try to animate their signatures. I'm not the best at explaining things and I have made some assumptions of some basic understanding of how Photoshop works, so hopefully this tutorial isn't too difficult to understand and follow. I'd love to see any results that people have. this was the final animated signature. I tried to keep it a subtle animation.

 

I'm not too sure about the logisitics of fx, but I have had some problems with inconsistencies with opacity and layer styles between frames. Obviously you can't fix the opacity problem with layer masks when changing the opacity of the stroke for example. I can think of two simple-ish solutions, the first being to convert the text layer to a smart object and then rasterize it. This would make the layer no longer have the fx layer and no longer be a text layer, meaning this should only be done once you know you won't be changing that layer anymore (I recommend duplicating the layer and hiding it on all frames if this is how you choose to go about it). The second would be to right click the layer with the fx and copy the layer style. Then select all the frames, remove the layer style and paste the layer style. I believe that should work. I rarely need to to worry about this since I generally have the text in the base signature and use layer masks to erase the animation from the text.

It get's far more complicated when both the signature and the text is animated since you need to match the number of frames in each animation, but I assume that's not what you're asking about.

 

A smart layer just means that it's a layer that keeps the detail even if you resize it down. So if you were to take a regular layer, resize it down and then resize it back up to it's original it would be pixelated, whereas with a smart object it wouldn't. Obviously if you resize it to a size larger than it's original however it will be pixelated.

Rasterizing the layer just converts the smart object to a regular layer.