animated gps batmobile icon

Step 5 Unadulterated gruntwork

now the real fun begins --

for the festivities we need a paint or image editor that at minimum supports both layers and transparency. i use photoshop.

i painted out the background of each image by creating a mask channel for the layer and painting black it where the image channel needed to be transparent. (we could simply use the eraser tool on the image channel itself, but painting in the mask channel gives us room for correcting mistakes and tweaking at any point in the process.)

rinse and repeat 36 times. do the same for the overheads.

once all of the backgrounds were painted out, i imported all the images into a single file. you may need to do some nudging here and there to make sure all the layers are aligned.

{update} i forgot to mention one big labor-saving step -- for users of adobe imageready. you can import multiple files simultaneously into one document as separate layers. you can't do that in photoshop (at least in cs). just select file menu > import > folder as frames ...

after importing, select file menu > edit in photoshop to take the file straight into photoshop. {/update}

i cropped the image to a square (in this case 400x400) large enough accommodate all the layers, then saved the file. i did the same for the overheads at 350x350.