Guide to Animating Your Emoticons with Photoshop

I've worked with Photoshop and its effects on a regular basis for over eight years, quickly becoming the "go-to" expert for friends and family with photo retouching, enhancement, or other graphics needs. Over the years I've used a great deal of different Photoshop effects for different purposes, and have found ways to make utilizing the effects easier and more enjoyable for both the average and the advanced Photoshop user. In my last article I discussed how to make your own emoticon. Wouldn't it be great if you could animate it? Well, this article will show you how to make your emoticon come alive in any message board or other online medium.

(Disclaimer: I've had people ask me complex questions about getting into the professional photography business. While I have friends in the profession and know that Photoshop is a necessary tool for the modern photographer, I'm not in the business, so I can't answer related questions; I just have a knack for retouching the photos of friends and family and am familiar with the workings of the program.)

First, I assume you already have an emoticon created to animate. If not, check out my article on creating one. Open the .psd (Photoshop Document) file you want to work on. Picture what exactly you want to animate on the smiley. Will its mouth move, will it wink/blink at you? Figuring this out is crucial before you move on.

Lay out the different layers of the emoticon you're going to edit. Click on the layer where your first animation will take place. You have the choice of copying the layer and editing, or just redoing it in a separate layer. Decide if you want to do a simple action in two or three frames (winking's a good example) or something more elaborate. The easiest way to do this is to, uh, "layer" your layers into folders-also called layer sets. (Get used to seeing that word a lot.) Click on "Create a new layer set" on your Layers Palette, then name your folder after whatever animation you plan to give your smiley. Put all of your layers involved in the animation into the folder you just named.