Tick Tock...

[Lin Evans]

As many of you may already know, Panos Efstathiadis is a veritable genius with Photoshop. Panos creates some of the finest Photoshop actions around. Recently, to celebrate his second year of being in business, he has created a dynamite new Photoshop action for CS, CS2 and CS3 which creates a photo-realistic watch with adjustable hands and an associated action which allows the user to place their own photograph on the face of the watch. This action was just referenced by Scott Kelby in his blog. Scott is the editor and publisher of Photoshop User Magazine, Layers magazine (the how-to magazine for everything Adobe®) and President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP).

At any rate, this great pair of actions is available free to commemorate Panos' second year anniversary of producing dynamite Photoshop actions.

Panos emailed me a couple days ago and inquired about the feasibility of using PicturesToExe to animate the watch. I thought that was a great idea and created a template and tutorial which I will link to directly. The animation uses the unique parent/child object relationship as well as the off-center rotation feature of PTE to animate the watch hands real-time. That is two minutes of animation of the watch is two minutes of real time with the minute hand progressing forward two minutes and the second hand ticking off each second. To make it flexible I made it animate for one minute then designed it to duplicate the original slide for the second minute and as many more minutes as the user desires.

To duplicate it one only need copy and paste the original file in the Main slide list then change the rotation of the minute hand six degrees forward and the hour hand one degree forward for each new slide to maintain accuracy. The placement of the hands is such as to allow as much unimpeded access for adding your own image to the face as possible. Of course the tutorial shows how to reposition the hour and minute hand to any time desired.

The sweep second hand required 120 keypoints per slide and doesn't need to be altered but will function perfectly as slides are duplicated. Because of the parent/child relationship, it's very easy to resize, zoom, reposition, etc., the watch anywhere on the screen and since all files have been converted to transparent background PNG's it will work with any background, etc.

Here's the links. First to Pano's site where you can download the actions. Be sure to get the proper one. There is one for Photoshop CS2 and CS3 and a different one for CS.

First a zipped small executable to see the animation and underneath a link to a five minute real sample:

http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/panoswatchexe.zip

http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/panoswatch4.zip

Then link to Panos' site:

http://www.panosfx.com/index.php?option=co...view&id=194

Next my template:

http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/panoswatch.zip

Then my PDF tuorial:

http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/watchtutorial.pdf

Finally a 28 meg avi tutorial if you have the bandwidth:

http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/panoswatch.avi

Note: right click on the above link and "save target as" to save the AVI rather than have it try to load real time:

Lin

[thedom]

LOL, avalaible on my site since yesterday : the "wedding watch" demo.

.

You can download it here.

[RayC]

The Dom,

Very cool I like it and would be very handy to have a Template.

I have tried to Log into your site but it Tell me my password is incorect, i know this not to be true as I have kept a record of since first registering with your site and I use my Forum Name and password and it still works for that.

any help would be appreciated.

RayC

[RayC]

Well Done again Lin Looking fireward to haveing a go at this one.

I must say you and Panos work very well together and produce some fantastic Things.

All the best Ray

[Ronniebootwest]

Hi Lin,

Panos sent me a copy of his 'Watch' actions a few weeks ago and I have made good use of it. Now that you have animated it, the whole thing takes on a completely different dimension. Your demo is brilliant and I just can't wait to follow your pdf tutorial on this one.

Thanks are to due to both yourself and to Panos for a brilliant piece of work.

Ron West

[Lin Evans]

Hi Ron,

You may want to look at this:

http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/panoswatch4.zip

It's a four minute demo which shows one of the ways someone might want to use this action and template. Essentially, you create a new PNG watch with a different face, it can even be a different file name once you have the first (panoswatch.png) one in the PTE file. Put the new slide in the main slide list, set the custom time for the slide to 60 seconds. Then you just select the children (click on the top object under the main slide then hold the shift key and click on the bottom object), right click the mouse and copy the three selected watch hands. Next highlight the new slide on the objects list and "paste" the children. The all you need to do is correct the start and end keypoint times for the minute and hour hand. Same start rotation as end rotation for preceeding slide, plus six degrees for the ending keypoint. Same start as end rotation degree for the hour hand, plus one degree for the end keypoint.

You can continue this as long as you wish to extend the time in one minute segments. The sample above runs four minutes.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin,

Panos sent me a copy of his 'Watch' actions a few weeks ago and I have made good use of it. Now that you have animated it, the whole thing takes on a completely different dimension. Your demo is brilliant and I just can't wait to follow your pdf tutorial on this one.

Thanks are to due to both yourself and to Panos for a brilliant piece of work.

Ron West

[thedom]

Funny that we had the same idea to use Panosfx watch without speaking to each other Lin and I.

Panosfx actions are such a source of inspiration !

I released and improved version of this demo (v1.1) :

- Black and white hands (instead of blue)

- Brand added (Cartier Paris )

- Intermediate zoom on the watch added

- Sparkles on seconds hand added

- Fire sound SFX added

[Ronniebootwest]

Hi Dom,

As usual, an excellent demo of how to use to 'The Watch'. Are you going to produce a Template for this?

Ron

[neil]

- Sparkles on seconds hand added

Could someone tell me how to do this effect?

I wanted to use it in as a sparkle on a smile(if you know what I mean)

Thanks

Neil

[thedom]

Hi Ron,

Thank you for your feedback.

I don't plan to release a template, Lin already made one which can be used really easily.

But If you want, I can upload my PTE project which include all the masks used in my demo (black and white Watch, Hands, Sparkles, ...).

Anyway, for those of you who have Photoshop, I recommend you to download and use Panos action to personnalize your watch.

[thedom]

- Sparkles on seconds hand added

Could someone tell me how to do this effect?

I wanted to use it in as a sparkle on a smile(if you know what I mean)

Neil, I will upload a basic PTE project of this effect for you tonight.

[thedom]

Lin,

I quickly red your tutorial which is as usual very well written and extremely explained.

May be there is something I didn't get but why don't you recommend to use the same method to erase the background as you explain to erase the hands ?

The 1-click method "turn of the visibility layer" (for "Canvas" layer) is much much quicker and cleaner.

I noticed in your PTE project that your hands are a little bit" dirty" as if they were "cut" by hand.

You can use the same method, ie hide all the layers except the hands (take care of second, minute and hour hands one after each other).

And I recommend you to turn off "drop shadow" style for the hands before triming and saving them as .png file.

PicturesToExe is able to manage it directly in the software in a very realistic way (dynamic shadow which changes depending on the rotation of the object!).

Just some advices which do not change anything to the quality of your template.

[Lin Evans]

Lin,

I quickly red your tutorial which is as usual very well written and extremely explained.

May be there is something I didn't get but why don't you recommend to use the same method to erase the background as you explain to erase the hands ?

The 1-click method "turn of the visibility layer" (for "Canvas" layer) is much much quicker and cleaner.

Hi Dom,

The reason I didn't suggest turning off the canvas layer was that Panos has made this action for CS, CS2, CS3 and "I think" for one version Elements. I'm not sure what they look like because I only have CS and when I tried to run the CS2/CS3 action I discovered some things it was doing which are not available in CS. I know that the hands are created the same way in each, but I'm not sure about the transparency on the canvas. Perhaps it would be worth while to mention that as an option for those where it's available. Perhaps it's the same in all, but I'm not certain. Which Photoshop version are you using?

I noticed in your PTE project that your hands are a little bit" dirty" as if they were "cut" by hand.

You can use the same method, ie hide all the layers except the hands (take care of second, minute and hour hands one after each other).

And I recommend you to turn off "drop shadow" style for the hands before triming and saving them as .png file.

PicturesToExe is able to manage it directly in the software in a very realistic way (dynamic shadow which changes depending on the rotation of the object!).

Yes, I did that from a JPG rather than from the layers because at the time I created the hands PNG I didn't have the action for CS yet. They would be cleaner and I may go back and extract them from the layers in the action.

I don't want to have to explain how to use the drop shadows in PTE in the tutorial because it would make it very long (already many pages) and we cover that in the user guide which will be out soon. The drop shadows which Panos made are fine for the action and the sophisticated users may just want to re-create the hands without drop shadows and the novice users probably would rather not deal with the extra time so I'll probably leave them as is.

Just some advices which do not change anything to the quality of your template.

Thanks - good information and I'll probably suggest deleting the Canvas when Panos returns from his trip and I can inquire about the differences between the software and action sets.

Best regards,

Lin

[thedom]

Neil, I will upload a basic PTE project of this effect for you tonight.

Neil, see http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7180

Lin,

I understand your explanation. The shadows in PTE are so powerful that it would take pages to explain all the possibilities!

Great news about the PTE user guide. When do you plan to release it ?

PS: I use Photoshop CS2.

[Lin Evans]

Neil, see http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7180

Lin,

I understand your explanation. The shadows in PTE are so powerful that it would take pages to explain all the possibilities!

Great news about the PTE user guide. When do you plan to release it ?

PS: I use Photoshop CS2.

Yes, we are very close. Jeff is waiting for me to finish the glossary which I hope to do tonight or tomorrow and then it will just be a matter of proofing and we will be ready to post it. As time goes on there will be more added to it in the way of tutorials and such but the basics are finished and hopefully we have covered the major things which most new users will find helpful.

Best regards,

Lin

[Ronniebootwest]

Hi Lin,

Why do you always allow the full topic to be re-pasted when you reply to a post? It does take up a lot of space and makes things more difficult to follow the complete thread. Can I suggest that you use the 'Add Reply' method at the bottom of the page.

Ron

[Lin Evans]

Hi Ron,

I don't, "always" - sometimes I answer in the same post when it makes sense, as in one of my above posts. Other times I repeat because it's difficult to answer all the questions from memory and I really don't have time to scroll back and forth to be sure I haven't missed anything of importance. I suspect in the great scheme of things it's not of major importance.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin,

Why do you always allow the full topic to be re-pasted when you reply to a post? It does take up a lot of space and makes things more difficult to follow the complete thread. Can I suggest that you use the 'Add Reply' method at the bottom of the page.

Ron

[mightec]

Dom

I seem to have missed your PTE file, where did you upload it, can you help.

[thedom]

Mike, the PTE file of this dmeo is not available.

But I can post it on my site if you wish.

[jfa]

..<snip>...But I can post it on my site if you wish.

I too would like that please Dom.

[mightec]

Dom

That would be great if you would not mind. I know that we all put a lot on to you but your work is so good, we all want to be able too use it.

[thedom]

No problem guys, I'm flattered.

Here is the PTE project: http://www.thedom.fr/share/dload.php?actio...amp;file_id=241

Have a good day.