Unless you’ve been under a rock (or just don’t do video), you know that you can edit videos and animations in Photo­shop. The video timeline works a little bit like the one in After Effects. Do you remember way back, around the time of ImageReady in Photoshop 5.5? Even if you don’t go that far back, you might still be aware of frame-based animations, where you could create a frame, move it forward, and change something—almost like an old flipbook style animation. These were all the rage back in the days of animated GIFs 1.0 (I just coined that term, but it makes sense). These animations were the result of stringing together absolute frames. They were efficient and enabled you to do some cool things. Good news: You can still create frame-based animations if you know where to click. In the bottom left of the Timeline (Window>Timeline), you’ll see three tiny boxes. Click on that to toggle between frame-based animations and video. 

This tip previously published in Colin Smith’s Photoshop Tips column, in the January, 2019 issue of Photoshop User magazine.