Good afternoon everyone! I'm on a roll today and would like to share with you a new way to fade between images like so:



Special thanks to droz for letting me use two of his userbars for the tutorial!

Special note: this tutorial requires GAP to implement. However, before you cringe and back away, we won't be using GAP in the "normal" fashion, which many folks don't like. We'll be using a new feature called the Morph tool (see my other tutorial I posted here regarding this neat tool). However, unlike my other Morph tutorial, we'll be skipping a bunch of steps and producing animated sigs in no time. And, MORE IMPORTANTLY, painlessly!

Also, you need to have some basic knowledge of GIMP before you proceed. I will not be addressing the basics.

You can use your own userbars or the ones I'm providing below:






[*]Open up your sigs in ONE GIMP image
[*]Add an alpha channel to the background layer like so:



[*]Duplicate your background layer and order them as follows:



[*]Go to the Morph tool using the following menu:



Once in the Morph tool, make sure you set your settings like so. Make sure you click the Shape Points button. This will add little control points all around the edge of your image to hold it in place. (Note, the green control points in each image)



Make sure your Source Image (on the left side) is set to the Image 1 (or background) not the background copy. Set your Destination Image (right side) to image 2.

[*]In the steps box, I used 5. This is how many steps it will take to get from the Source to Destination image. You can use more or less.

[*] Hit OK

You'll notice that you now have several layers.

[*]Go back to the Morph tool and make the following changes:



Use Image 2 for the Source and Image 1 Copy for Destination. Make sure you hit the Shape Points button to hold the edges in place.

[*]Hit OK

We're almost home free!

[*]Go into your Layers dialog and make the following changes:



[*]Test your animation to see if you like it (Filters | Animation | Playback)
[*]Make changes as necessary to adjust to your taste.
[*]Optimize and save as animated gif.


You should have this:



How did you do? Pretty easy, eh!? Let me know if you have any questions. I may have left something out as I'm in a rush, but will follow-up with you later if you have questions.

Show me your work.

Happy GIMPing.

Art

Fence I am honored to have my work in your tutorial. You are the man!

It WORKS! Awsomeness!!

Your Right! It does work!

wOOt!

I changed it a bit so it could work with multiple pics

hmm...strange, it wasnt so fast in the playback

How do u get it to work with multiple pics

1Jiblam: check your PM's.

I get up to the point where I am to use Morph but it is greyed out not sure what I am doing wrong. I open one image then open the second and copy it the other image as a new layer add alpha to the original image order them as shown then brick wall. What is my mistake. I know you said you were not going to go over the basics but I sure wish there was a forum topic covering the basics.../grin.

Right click on your background layer and select "Add Alpha Channel". I covered that step in the main morph tutorial.

Art

Great Tut!! but one prob, its not letting me add alpha chanel onto my layer.....why is it doing that?

Did that just ike in the tutorial it must be my install or something cause everyone else seems to get it. I thank you for the reply and will try to reinstall all of Gimp and Gap ...yet again.

Great tutorial. I loved it! I also like how you can change a few details to make it your own.

thank you for the tutorial, Fencepost, very much appreciated.

I am a novice but I was able to follow your instructions and got this... :l:





one thing I noticed, was that the first two origninal layers has a white border, but when the layers were added after morphing, the border colours changed, so I had to manually re-draw the border white for each layer. Do you know how to overcome this?

thanks.

Sure do. I need to update one or more images to correct it. I also created a Morphing Images tutorial using the morph tool and Rimshot (a fellow GIMPtalk.com member) showed me how to correct that problem. I updated those images, but forgot about it here.

Click the Shape button prior to doing the morph. This will add points around the entire edge of each image and hold them in place.

Sorry about that. I'll update as soon as I get the chance.

Art

[quote]Click the Shape button prior to doing the morph. This will add points around the entire edge of each image and hold them in place.
[/quote]

ok great, thanks for the tip :l:

Thanks Art. This is just what I was looking for as the othr GAP method is really scary

Glad you found it useful! However, what's really scary is your current eyeball avatar! That thing's freaking me out.... :l:

Sorry I am going to sound like an Ãœber noob, but where can I get Gap?

Linux (ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/plug-ins/v2.2/gap/) and Windows (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=121075)

For Windows, just download, extract, and double-click and it will self-install. Re-start GIMP. I don't know how it's done for Linux.

For some reason I can't get morph to come up to where i can click on it.

When I do this with signatures, the tweening layers are missing their borders even after I clicked "Shape". Please PM me on how to fix this.

nice work.
can u do this without using gap?if so how to?

This doesn't work well with images with transparent backgrounds. I used a dingbat and it throws in extra pixels. Yes, I clicked the Shape button. The one on the left is before morphing. I've tried it with several different images with transp. bgs and the same thing happens.

Later: I found out that if I semi-flatten the images first, those stray pixels don't occur.

Hello,

Please tell me how to open my two images in one image for this tutorial.

Thank you!
Shelzy