[quote]make a new file of your choise since you can resize it later...set your background to color black. Make a new layer. Now choose gradient tool, set it to Radial Gradient (the circle) and Foreground to transparency. (use white as your foreground color) make a nice sphere. Now duplicate it.
If you want to make a name like I did or something like that, make number of layers and type each letter seperatly on each layer. Now do the Gaussian Blur on each letter same amount of pixels...easy way to do it is after the first blur simply click on the next layer and Ctrl+F
to repeat the filter.
After your are done, click on that circle at the bottom of layer pallete that looks like "Yin & Yang" to creat an adjustment layer...when menu pops out choose levels. Now adjust your levels so that the balls and letters look nice and smooth... can be a little blurry at the edges.
Try moving the balls past each other to see if they blend like liquid balls.
Now the rest of work is done in Image Ready...
so go ahead and jump to IR with your current file...
the main thing in IR is to measure where your animation ends. So group all layers, now open new layer on top of them all and use brush tool to draw a box around your main animation ending so that later you can crop it.
Once you messured it out, on the first frame hide all the letters and move the balls together to make it look like a single big ball...
make a new frame and move the balls where they come to a stop, from here click on the tweening animation button...its to the left of "duplicate current frame button"...
once you click you need to choose how many frames you want and click "ok"...I chose 15...dont choose any futher...you will get tired of making effects on every damn frame.
here you will have a nice half looking animation.
so what do we do with letters?
well thats simple since they all are hidden...you need to go frame by frame showing them in the right time mostly starting from your center letters.
After you are done with the half of your animation select all the frames and click on "duplicate current frame button" to copy all those frames...now with all those frames selected click on the triangle button in the upper right corner of frame pallete and select "reverse frames"
here you go! you have a simple animation without effect ...
as for effect, its a bit time consuming...the most basic thing you gonna do is select the frame, jump back to PS, in channels Ctrl click any immage to select the shape, creat new layer, fill with the coloryou want .....yes every frame like that back and forth until all the layers are made.
after you are done doing it, you may pick up the effect you want, but it works diffrently...you can use lighing FX, but I made my own layer style with bevel and embos as well other little nifty adjustments....because its easer and faster to polish all the layers...for Lighing FX I recomend to use "actions" to record what you did so this can be easely repeated by clicking "play".
Once you made what you like in PS , use it on one of your layers and jump to IR...here you simply have to copy layer style and paste on the next layer...
for Lighing effect users, you need to play action on every layer in PS before jumping to IR...
finnaly hide all the white balls and adjust each frame all over again...after completing it use crop tool to select the area where your animation will be and so that the box will be outside the selection, press "enter" and bingo! now hide the background and make transparency...save as .gif and done!
P.S. ahh, ok I fixed alittle spelling and made it more clear hopefully.
what you start off with are two circular gradients, both on a separate layer, with a black background, like this:
What the 'levels' adjustment layer does, is that it separates the colors. anything that is darker than 50% gray will become completely black, and anything that is lighter will become completely white, like this:
Now, if you move the two layers over eachother like this:
you'll see that it gets a little brighter in the middle because the two layers overlap.
If you turn the 'levels' layer on again, it'll look like this:
I can't show you a picture of the levels settings, but the left slider and the right slider are almost at the middle.
Most likely what you'll want to do right now is to make separate shapes for the animation. If you want a layer with the shape of the white circles, do as follows;
Go to the 'channels' palette, it's another tab above the 'layers' palette. You'll see 4 channels, RGB, Red, Green and blue. The last three will all looks the same, since there is no color in the image. If you hold CONTROL (or COMMAND if you use a mac) and click on a channel (red or blue or green, doesn't matter), you will get a selection. The white parts of your picture will be 100% selected, the dark parts will not be selected. (any colors in between will be selected depending on how bright they are. 50% gray will be 50% selected, and so on)
Now, click back on the 'layers' tab again, make a new layer, and fill the selection with a color you like.
Now, turn that layer invisible, move the spheres a bit further apart for the next frame, and repeat.
