The design assignment “Animated Comic Book Covers” was challenging but a lot of fun. It really tested my rookie skills of photoshop and GIMP. First I had to choose a comic book cover to animate. I wanted something that would my photoshop ability but not be too challenging. This X-men cover is from 1991.

 

 

I chose to animate the laser that Cyclopes was shooting out. I did this in 3 separate layers. The process isn’t going to be as clear as I would like but a lot of figuring this out was trial and error. First, I photoshopped half of the laser out of the picture (half farthest to the right). I used the clone stamp too to fill in the area that the laser was at. This took some messing around with to try to make it look as least photoshopped as possible.

You can see a clear line as to where the laser was. The reason for this is I used the magnetic laso to create a layer of the area around the photoshopped laser. So above and below it. I did this to try to keep the photoshop consistent between the different layers. There may be an easier way to do this but I just did the way that made sense to me. Thinking about it now that I am explaining it I probably should have photoshopped it and saved it as a picture. Then  on the same layer in photoshop take the other half of the laser out and then save that as a picture. I did save them as 3 seperate pictures but took longer steps. The next photoshop looked liked this:

Using the original image with a few photoshop corrections to make them consistent I opened the images as layers in gimp. I used the blend function to make the animation a smoother transition, if that makes sense. The reason I did half of the laser at a time is I was trying to make the effect of the laser shooting out. I think I achieved that slightly but maybe could have made some changes to the GIMP animation to better it. Here is my final animation:

 

4 Stars