Before we start automating your story, you can always save it as static template. And to do that, come here to File, Save As, choose your folder, wherever you want to save it, and you can simply save it as whatever you want. Make sure it's Photoshop selected from here, because that is the basic Photoshop file format and it's going to allow you to later on jump back in, edit where you left off, save it again, and then move on from there. Simply select Save, choose Ok, and your template is saved. But once again, this is a static template. It's not animated.

And if you want to save it out as a JPEG to use it on Instagram File, Save As, and instead of Photoshop, simple click right here and choose jpg. Click save and make sure it's on the large file because the smaller the file is, the less of the quality it contains. So click on Okay, and now you save it as a JPEG. And once again, this is all static. And to make it dynamic and make it animated, you have to go to the window and choose timeline from here. And next up, you're going to see that you have this timeline here selected, and what we need to do first is click Create Video Timeline.

Now Photoshop contains two different video timelines. One is for the video that we selected right now. And the other one is for gift files. So depending on what you are creating, if you're creating a looping gifts gift file, it's going to look all over and over again, then you're going to choose that but if you're creating video, like we are doing at the moment, then you have to create a video timeline. So what you see right here are all of the elements that we created here in the Layers panel. And if I simply hover, click and enlarge all of this, you can see that we have Same elements as we do right here in our Layers panel, but all of them are stacked like this.

To zoom in a bit closer, you can use this and to zoom out, you can use this, you can see the linked right here at the top, and the length currently is at five seconds. If you want to extend it, you have to extend your layers right here. So I'm going to click on the BG, as you can see, it's selected right here, and I'm simply going to extend it to the right to roughly around eight seconds. So just go until you see eight seconds at the top right here. And now you can crop it to right here, and then move it back. Now move all of them.

And it's a bit tedious to do this, but it's important because you want to make sure that your elements are visible at all times. And as you can see, we have two folders at the top for our arrows. And we are going to deal with them in just a second. So for the folders, you cannot just extend it because it contains different elements inside, you have to open those folders as you can see right here, and you have to extend these different elements to the right. Now as I said, you can make this timeline go a bit further you can make it 10 seconds or make it shorter, like four or five, six seconds doesn't matter. It's really up to you and what you're going to create.

I'm going to lower this down, simply use Ctrl zero and maybe I can enlarge it just a bit so that you can see what I'm doing. So as you can see, we created this story. And now the trick with animations is this is what we are going to end up with. So this is our end result when we have to build it from backwards to forwards. So what that means we are going To end up with this design, and we are going to start with a blank canvas. And all of these elements are going to appear from left to right top bottom, and we are going to choose some overlays and so on.

And all of them will be displayed like this at the end of our animation. So the best way to start is to remember where all your elements are. But when you have a lot of elements inside like we do right now, it's really not good to remember where they are. So what I'm going to do is simply draw some guidelines. We're going to draw a guideline to here and that's why we selected view and rulers because these rulers are going to help us create these guides. Simply include a guide, it's really simple.

Use the move tool, click right here and simply hold your left mouse click and drag a guide until it snaps to this edge right here. Now we're going to know that this is the end have our top color. I'm going to zoom in a bit closer, because we're going to click on the text and do it one more time for the text. So when we animate this in a few seconds, we can be certain where the text goes and where the color goes. I'm going to leave this like it is because it snaps to these edges. I'm going to leave this bottom color like it is because we're going to move it and it's going to appear from the right to the left.

And finally, I'm going to create one more for this text and simply draw one from the top so you can draw them from the top and from the left. Next up, we are going to remove all of these elements one by one. So click on the image, click right here, hold Shift, move it to the top until it snaps with the top edge. Next, move the text so hold shift and move it right around here. Click on the color, move it click on this color. Move it.

And if you forget where all these elements are, you can always save this out as a JPEG image and open it up and then look at it to remind yourself where all your elements are. So we're going to click on this text, move it down. And we're going to leave these arrows where they are, and I'm going to explain why in just a second. Next up, we have this text so you can always zoom in a bit closer, hold Shift, move it right here to the top. And finally we have our line, which we are going to move just down so click on it, hold shift and move it all the way down. If it doesn't work, you can always hold shift and use bottom arrow to nudge it all the way down.

So it takes a bit of time depending of where your line is, but you can make sure that your line is centered and position as it should. Now as you can see, we don't have any elements apart from these arrows, and I'm going to explain why in just a second. And now we have to animate all of these elements. So first things first, we're going to start with these arrows. So you can find them right here. And for this, you can convert all of this to Smart Objects, because it's going to be easier to animate just one Smart Object instead of two objects inside of each folder.

And you can do that. But I want to make these arrows blink for example. And if you want them to blink one by one, you can create two Smart Objects, but I want both of them to blink at the same time. So I'm simply going to right click, Convert to Smart Object, click on the second one, right click Convert to Smart Object. And now I have just one. So I'm going to click on this arrow right here to open up this and do the same for this.

So what you can see right here is you have these effects that you can apply to your timeline. So what you can do is go to the zero point. So this is the start of our animation and click on the opacity and click on the opacity for both. So left and right arrows. And what that means is going to start with that opacity. And I'm going to lower it from here to zero.

So simply click and drag to zero, or you can hit zero on your keyboard two times, and it's going to make the opacity zero, as you can see right here, so we're going to start making all of them. So just move down and this is for our text. So we are going to click transform, because we want to transform the position of the text. Move down we have top color. And because this is a shape layer, we have to animate vector mask position. That's how Photoshop works.

And do the same because these are all Shape layers. So simply click, arrow, open it up. As you can see, we have this style position opacity and all of it doesn't really matter, because most of the time you're going to use transform and opacity. For the image, we're going to use transform for the text, we're going to use transform because we're going to move it for the shop now transform, and we reached bg. Now BG layer stays as it is, we are not going to animate it at all. And now we can start animating all of our elements.

So let's start with our image. You can select your image right here and find it here in your timeline. So to see where it is, here it is. So we chose transform and you can click on this blue diamond, move it to one second, until it snaps to one second. So that's going to tell Photoshop to animate it from this point to this point. So this starting point is our Image all the way at the top.

If I click on it, you can see what it is. And on this one second, we want to make it appear and be where it originally was. So to do that, you can hit Ctrl, click right here inside of the BG, make sure you're on the one second, make sure image is selected, hit V for the move tool, and simply position it like this to the top Ctrl D to deselect. And now if I go back, hit space to play, you can see it moves. So from all the way up and hit space to position right here. So that's how easy it is to animate these elements.

And now we're going to move on and animate some of the other ones. So maybe we can start with this top color, bottom color and this text so you can close image sheet right here because we don't need it anymore. Now what we need, we need bottom color. So click right here to make exactly The same selection. So why we did this is, this is our starting point. So you have to do for all of it for all of them at starting point.

Next up, we want to move from starting point here. Because if you animated to two seconds, for example, like we are going to do now, and don't put this starting point, it's going to start from here and slowly animate to two seconds. So if I show you that and go to two seconds, make sure I position it to the right, like so Ctrl D, then click on this one, and delete it. And if I hit space, you can see it start animating from this point, we don't want it. So go back to the number one second, and make sure you move it like so. So when I jump back, create a keyframe.

Hit space, you can see it stays and then starts from one second and that's what exactly what we want to achieve. So close bottom color, find the top color. Go to two seconds, use this rectangular marquee tool. And if you remember, this is the edge of our top color. So selected, make sure you're on two seconds, press V for the move tool. And now let it snap to a left edge like so Ctrl D to deselect, and you can remove this guide because we don't need it anymore.

To do that, use the Move tool, click on it and simply remove it very founded. And we now need to animate the text so jump back to one second. Close this, hit new arrivals, go to two seconds. Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool, zoom back in and snap it to this guide. Because we created it for the text, choose the move tool, click right here to position it to the left Ctrl D to deselect and remove the guide like we did before. As you can see, it's really simple to create these animations.

And now we're going to finish up with text. So let's close this. Do the same for the line. So from here and find found. Let's quickly see Yeah, here it is forever young. Select both of them.

And now what we have to do is choose the line control click inside of the BG press V position into the bottom edge because it was right here and now choose forever young and simply position it to be here. So to go to the top edge of this so V, top edge Ctrl D and if I hit Ctrl zero And go back. You can see we already start with our design nicely. Now one last thing we need to do is animate shop now. So from here, jump back one more second to around here. Use rectangle marquee tool and select it from here.

It was shocked now to the top edge Ctrl D, and you can also remove this guide to the top. And if I jump back, close all of this, jump to the start hit space, you're going to see how our animation looks like. And you can see it's forming quite well now. Now it stops right here at four seconds. And as you can see, we still don't have our arrows. So we're going to fix that now.

So for our arrows, you can hit obesity right here for both of them. You can move this noun and you can for example animal Meet them. Let's see at every second point. So this is a second four seconds, first point, second point, second, first point, second point, and so on. You can animate them at every point to see how that looks like. So you can select this one, hit zero and select this one, hit zero, then move one more time, hit 02 times, select this one hit 02 times.

Then once again zero, select the other ones zero. Do the same for this two times. Select this one two times. I'm going to pause the video and do this for a few more times. And when I jump back, you can see what I did. So we started from 01 hundred 01, hundred and so on.

So we end up with 100 at seven second mark and we still have one second at the end to be empty. So they're going to stay at 100% of a city. So if I jump all the way down to the start, I can close these arrows. And if I hit space, you can see how all our animations look like you can see arrows flashing. And they're going to stop and finish at what we started. So as you can see, it's really quite easy to animate everything, you just have to plan in advance.

And you have to start with the blank canvas and then move on and create your final design. Once again, if you don't remember how your final design looked like, or you forget where you left some of the elements you can always see with a static JPEG, and then look at it and then remember where you left off and where you included some elements and you can always go back to this JPEG and to remind yourself, also using guides is really important and it's really going to cut you your workload and is going to help you remember where certain elements are. So you can always make sure to have that perfect design that you started working with at the start. So I really hope you like this technique. And as you can see, it's quite easy to animate these stories. And once you get the hang of it, you can do these animations in just a few minutes.

And as I said, because this is a Photoshop, you can always save it as a template. And what's great about this is now you have animated template. So if you remember, we saved static template, and now you have animated one, and to save that one for later use, hit File, Save As, and just add to my story and animated. Hit enter. One more time. And now you have static story with this template and you have animated story with exactly the same template.

So you can Use both of them for later use. You can replace these images using smart objects you can choose other colors. So if you have your brand colors, you can brand these backgrounds however you want. You can choose different fonts and so on. In the next video I'm going to show you how you can export this unlimited Instagram story to be used on Instagram.