#masking tutorial

Load frames for each scene separately like so: (File > Scripts > Load files into stack).

Click on the little icon at the top corner of your frame animation window, select 'Make Frames into layers', click the icon again and then select 'Reverse Frames':

Do this for both scenes. Once that's done you can see how many frames you have in each scene. Both scenes have to have an equal number of frames for this to work so I cut both scenes down to 60 frames.

BLENDING

Now click on the corner icon again, Select All Frames, click icon again and then Copy Frames:

Go over to other scene and repeat the steps from above, except instead of copy, Paste all frames OVER the selection:

One scene will disappear in behind the frames from the scene you pasted into the window (In this case I pasted Regina's scene over Robin's) and now you can proceed with your editing in this window.

In your layers palette, click on the bottom file folder and Create a new group:

Select all the layers from the top scene of Regina and drag them into the folder. Make another group and do the same with Robin's scene. Click on the TOP (Regina) group folder and change the blend mode from Pass Through to something like Screen or Lighten.

You can play with different blend modes. I'm using Lighten for this one. You'll end up with something like this:

Now that you have a visual of both scenes, you can work on positioning/cropping/resizing.

Ensure that the group you want to move is selected in the layers palette and that all frames are selected before moving your scene around:

Now start positioning.

(TIP: If you forget to select all frames before moving, click the corner icon on the animation palette > Match Frames From Layers > Match Layer Position:

You can do this with almost any kind of layer if you want an action done in one frame done in the others.)

Now that everything is where we want it, select your crop tool, set your width/height preferences and crop your gif:

Once that's done, you'll need to size (Image > Image Size > put in your width and/or height settings), color, brighten, etc. Here is what mine now looks like:

MASKING

Time for the touch up phase. The scenes are smoothly blended but now we have to erase all the bits of each scene that we don't want. To do that we are going to mask both scenes.

Click on the Regina group and Add Layer mask:

Do the same for the Robin group:

With the layer mask selected on Robins, select the erase tool. Make sure the foreground/background colors are as follows:

(TIP: You can also use the paintbrush tool instead of the erase tool if you wish. Just make sure the foreground/background colors are reversed:

)

And now you can start erasing. I selected a 65px soft round brush and got rid of the stuff in Robins scene that was covering Regina's face:

And then did the same for Robin:

(TIP: If you accidentally erase something you don't want to, reverse the foreground/background colors and mask it back in. The beauty of the layer mask!)

Aaaaand that is pretty much it. From here I do my final touch ups. Adjust the colors, add text, sharpen, set frame rate, blah dee da da we are done! My end result: