In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, you’ll witness how Deke compiles the Puppet-Warped results from last week’s technique into a falcon-flapping animated movie inside Photoshop. Now as much as I try, on a weekly basis, to turn video-based Photoshop education into eloquent, elucidating prose, this is one of those cases where the medium should be the message. In other words, if you’re interested in learning how to create a moving picture, then moving pictures are probably the best way to show you how to do it. So watch the video, because Deke carefully goes through the process in that methodical way that reassures even someone like me that they can do it. And because this squawks for itself:

OK, wait, I do have a few observations (can’t help myself, apparently):

1) You’ll need to dumb down your smart objects.

If you were playing along last week, then you know these wing variations were created with Puppet Warp applied to smart objects (19 times). You’ll need to rasterize them to preserve the puppetry. Fortunately, Photoshop CS6 allows you to gather all your smart object-based layers by simply clicking the Filter for Smart Objects button in the Layers panel, as shown below.

Then choose Select > All Layers (the definition of “all” at this point will only include the filtered choices). With the Rectangular Marquee tool, right-click in the image window and choose Rasterize Smart Object.

2) Decrease the image size before lining up all the layers in the Timeline panel.

Choose Image > Image Size and set accordingly. Deke uses 18 x 72 for this project.

3) In the Timeline panel, you’ll want to choose the Create Frame Animation option.

This will allow you to set up the layers as frames.

4) The result from this technique is a Quicktime movie; want an animated GIF?

For members of lynda.com, Deke’s got an exclusive movie this week in which he shows you how turn this file into an animated GIF. If you’re not a member of lynda.com, you can get a free week trial at lynda.com/deke. If you want a hint, check out the Save for Web dialog box.

5) Take note of how Deke says “GIF.”

And recognize that this episode was recorded before the guy who invented the thing reminded everyone how to pronounce it. Deke knows these things. End of story.