Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	Dirty Little Secret - All American Rejects
Entry tags:	tutorial

Adobe Image Ready Tutorial!
Here is my brief tutorial on how to make an animated icon in Adobe Image Ready for anyone who is interested (and that means you angelogdarknes). It's actually fairly simple, and I hope I don't confuse it all so it seems impossible. Also, I have a mac, so I hope that's not too different.


And here's our example...


This icon has 5 layers

So, there is one layer for each scene of the icon.

Now, what you want to be working with is the 'animation bar'.
Look here it is!

There's a picture of how many frames you have, and underneath that there should be the word 'Forever'. If it isn't this word, click that space and change it to forever. This makes the animation loop continuously.

Alright, so once you have all of your layers made, you just duplicate your first frame in the animation bar (you should only have one at first) by clicking on it and then clicking the button with the paper on it, to the left of the trash can.

Then, you choose what layers are showing for each frame. You can hide layers by unmarking the little eye to the left of them. Depending on what you want, you can have more than one layer in one frame.
For example, for my main icon, I have a picture of roy and the text changes above it. I do this by using two layers for one frame.

Just a note, if you change things around in the first frame, all of the other frames are affected. Dont' worry too much about this you can just adjust accordingly.


Back to our original example -> Since I have the fifth frame selected in the animation bar, I choose to only have the fifth layer showing. Now, since the fifth layer is on top, I could have all of the other underneath it, but that's unnecessary. This is were playing around with your options comes in. You can layer things transparently onto another like in this icon...



Here I just made a new layer for each of the 'anger crosses'.

You can also use the animation bar to decide how long you want each frame to play for. Underneath each frame there should be a number, like each frame is 2 seconds. You just click on that to change it.

I'm not sure what the button with the little circles does. Looks like I haven't experimented enough yet!

When you want to save, make sure that on this bar

the colors are set to 128. You can make them less, but it cheapens the quality. Sometimes, that can give an interesting quality to the icon and it makes it smaller, but icons usually aren't that large in the first place.

Okay, go to File -> Save Optimized As
then just save it with some name that you'll remember.

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask me any questions. I'll try and help, but I'm clearly no expert at this. I stick to the basics.