Quake4 explosion animation avatar Tutorial
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Intro:
This photoshop/imageready tutorial will guide you through making an explosion animation using screenshots I made in Quake4, I Knew this explosion was coming so I took as many screenshots as I could to make this a smooth explosion avatar as we can. Let's get to work shall we.
Step 1:
Firt download the screenshot I already resized to 100x80, using the Re-sizing loads of photos tutorial you will learn on how to re-size alot of photoshop or screenshots with a few simple clicks.
Now we have to put all the screenshots together in one photoshop file, so open photoshop and begin with the last image (the gray smoke after the big explosion) then working up until you reached the top layer which are the small explosions, if you do it like this it will make the imageready part ALOT easier.
Clearer steps:
- Open up shot00193.jpg
- then open shot00192.jpg, Select the move tool 
and drag this layer on top of shot00193.jpg
- Continue doing this until you reached shot00170.jpg
Now close all the screenshots you had to drag on top of the shot00193 layer, leaving only shot00193 open with all the other screenshots on top, Select the shot00193.jpg window and click the imageready icon in the toolbar. 
Step 2:
Now that we're in imageready open up the animation window, Window > Animation, this window will popup in the lower left corner.
- Click the duplicate current frame icon in the animation window TWICE. 
- Then hide Layer 23 in the layers window, making layer 22 visible on the third frame we just copied.
Continue doing these above 2 steps until you reached the background layer, DON'T hide the background layer since it's our last layer.
Step 3:
done copying and hiding layers? 
Good, then your finished and can view your work in imageready using the play button in the animation window, pretty neat huh?
This is my animation window at the last stage:
The last thing we have to do is save the file as a GIF, so go to File > Save optimized as.. > And save it somewhere you can find it.
If you like to make your own screenshots you should make as many screenshots as you can to make the animation as smooth as possible later on, good luck! If you enjoyed making this tutorial please join the forums.
Celox
