Using the Liquify tool to create simple animations.

Because you can smoothly distort images with the liquify tool its a great way to make simple animations which you can put together with the help of Image Ready .
In this tutrial you will make Gary Wilmott’s (the all round entertainer) face go through a myriad of emotion, from happy to sad, angry to frightened.
Download and save Gary.jpg (click here to get picture) and open it in photoshop.
Open the layer pallete window>layer and duplicate the background layer Layer>Duplicate Layer. This makes a new layer that is exactly the same as the original.
Then activate liquify Filter>Liquify. Using the various tools make subtle changes to the face of Gary, experiment with the different tools but keep the changes subtle so the end animation will be smooth. When you are happy with the changes you have made click OK to come out of liquify mode and then do the same process again; Duplicate layer and make some more changes in Liquify.

Continue the process for at least ten frames or until you are happy with the transition from the first layer to the last.

Now you are ready to jump to image ready File>jump to> image ready. Image ready will now open. You will see that image ready is very similar to photoshop, the program is used for making short animations and for optimizing graphics for the web.
In Image Ready you create frames from layers to make your animation, to do this open the Animation window Window>Animation and click on the opions arrow on the top right of the window and select Make frames from layers. Hit the play button and your animation will start to play, but you will probably notice that it does not loop, i.e it goes from one state to another but not back to the beginning, to make a good amnimation you want it to loop.

To make your animation loop go to the options bar on the animation window and reverse the animation Reverse Frames and then select Flatten frames into layers. The reversed frames will be made into new layers, now delete the existing frames by selecting Delete Frames and then select Make Frames From Layers again. That is a bit compicated but now you should have a looping animation. You can enhance your animation bychanging the speed of certain frames by clicking the time (secs) in the animation window to make certain frames visible for a longer period of time.
The last thing to do is to save the animation File>save Optimised As, this will saved a compressed version suitable for use on the internet. Once it is saved you can drop it into any web page just like an ordinary image and it will play your animation.
Done.