- Photoshop can be used to make simple edits to videos.Flag of movie image by Yuriy Panyukov from Fotolia.com
Photoshop CS3 introduced the ability to edit videos in a program that is traditionally designed for stills. This change can be a drastic adjustment for users who are used to working with static images. While it is convenient to create and edit simple videos, creating an intricate or long ones requires patience. Photoshop presents videos frame by frame, and adjustments must be made accordingly. The typical video is 20 to 30 frames per second, so a 5-second video contains 100 or more frames. - A video is imported into Photoshop like a normal image file. The Animation panel contains most of the controls used to control the stream of video. It displays each frame in the video, has the "Play" and "Pause" buttons, and buttons to create or duplicate new frames. The entire video is housed in a video layer within the video panel. If either panel is not visible, select the corresponding option from the "Window" menu at the top of the program.
- Each frame in the video can be affected by all of the Photoshop tools as normal. Erase, draw and manipulate a frame, although unfortunately, each frame must be edited by hand to keep the change. To add a static element to the video, create a new layer and add the element to that layer instead. The timeline's curved ends can be dragged to edit the duration of the video from either end.
- Export a video by clicking "Render to video" from the "Export" sub-menu of the "File" menu. Select the video settings presented in the dialog box, such as frame rate, selected frames, and file format. The most popular formats are MOV and MP4. Additionally, it can output image sequences, which is a sequence of still-video frames, for a compositing programs incompatible with Quicktime.
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