Create Quick Animated Waving Flag Using Photoshop Action

If you are reading this post you might be in need of customized animated waving flag or want to learn how to create animated flag.In order to design the below animated flag you must be familiar with basic things in photoshop, if you are a starter there are tons of tutorials about photoshop, the one's i recommend are the Good Tutorials and Pixel 2 Life, also Google about how to execute the photoshop actions that might help in following the below tutorial more easily.

Assuming you have a basic idea of Photoshop and Photoshop actions, here we go with the tutorial.Download the photoshop flag action Here and unzip the files.

Note: The Below screenshots of the tutorial are from Photoshop CS3

1) First Load Flag Photoshop Action(Animated Flag.ATN) file using the load action option in photoshop, check the below image to have a bigger view.

Load Action

2) Open the flaganimation.psd , follow the instruction in the white box. to make it simple create a flag file with the following dimensions width 412 px and height 217 px

3) Drag the flag file(that you created) onto the white box as shown in the below screen and in the layers pallete, select the top most layer(that is you flag file layer, right click and click on merge down)

Drag The Flag File



Merge Down

4) Now when you look at the layers pallete you will have single layer with layer name as Flag.

5) Now create a folder with name animflag in C drive of your computer and copy all the bump1 to bump13 psd files that you unzipped earlier

6) As you have the flag action loaded, just click on the arrow button just beside the name to expand.

Load The Animated Flag Action

7) Select the flapping flag and click on play button at the bottom of the action winndow as shown in the below screen.

Action Play button

8) Just Keep clicking continue for all the messages you get and click on play button again if you are stopped in between.

9) Finally you will have the message as "Now, go into Image Ready and create an animation by selecting "Make Frames From Layers" in the animation palette menu". when you look at the layers pallete you will have a total of 13 layer including the flag layer.

9) If you have cs2 clickon image ready button to switch to imageready for animation. If you are using photoshop cs3 then Click on Window at the top and click on Animation to get the animation window.

Animation Windows In Photoshop Cs3

10) Click on the down arrow below the X button on the animation window and click on make frames from layers as shown in the below screen.

Make Frames From Layers

11) Now you are ready to have the waving flag animation , just click on the play button to preview the animated flag. adjust the timing between the frames as you need(0.05) is preferable and save the file as gif.

Check the below sample of the animted flag that i crerated for one of my web friends

Hope you like the tutorial, check back soon for my next post how to create the animated flag using flash, comment using the below comments section for help or any other request, its time to upgrade my blog theme.will work on that.

Thanks!