If you’ve ever seen a photo slideshow online, you’ve probably seen what we in the industry call “movement.” We call it this or even sometimes call it “motion.” Defined, this means that instead of each fixed photo simply staying still and directly transitioning into another one, there’s sort of a graceful floating that goes on. Compare a slideshow shown via an old projector versus one shown online today. The old projector gives you still photos with no transition at all. All you hear is a physical click, click, click between photos. When a slideshow is created in a video editing application, there’s a lot you can do with it.
Let’s assume you’ve already gone ahead and imported your images into Adobe Photoshop. You can see each photo on the same track in the Timeline panel. To add motion, all you need to do is either right-click on the image section in the Timeline panel or click the small arrow that’s in the upper right corner of the same area. When you do that, a small dialog box will appear. It’ll give you a few options, such as which type of movement you’d like and what you’d like to set the attributes of that motion to. You can zoom, pan, rotate and more. Within each motion, there are options, such as which angle you’d like to pan to, how much you’d like to zoom and which direction you’d like to rotate. There are more, so I encourage you to take a peek at this dialog to see what suits you. To test each out, simply click on the playhead and drag it back and forth.
It’s easy to add movement to images in the Timeline panel of Photoshop. Movement adds energy and life to an otherwise boring slideshow. If you have any questions regarding this tip, please let me know down below. Or, if you have any further suggestions, please feel free to share. Thanks!
By the way, if you’d like to read through the full post on adding motion to photos on the timeline, please feel free to follow this link.
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