Glowing Animations

A Basic walkthrough to make images glow and light up. This can be used for other looping animations.

The Basics of Glow

• Glow is really to do. Basically it revolves around 1 THING: OPACITY. You change the opacity of the frames to make them glow and that's about it :) Hence, it's the first and easiest tutorial around. The simplicity of it, however, doesn't mean that it's BORING. It looks really nice when used properly, everytime I have used glow was with FMA related layouts since alchemy has a lot of those effects.
• When using glow, looping it is the best way to increase and then decrease down to normal. It's very much like the avatar example used before.

Glow: Edwardo's Hand

• This example is Edwardo's Hand, used in MyCurry's layout, The Truth of Alchemy. This was cornered at the end of the layout, and since the layout had a lot of glow, it truely fitted the scenario.
• To follow along with this tutorial, download the seperate frames, here. If you want to do your own animation with this tutorial, then go ahead and use frame #1 and then draw on it the way I am going to go through.

Step 1: The Starting Frame and Outline
So in the layout, this is the original cut out of the layout, with glow, I want the animation to START with this image, glow, and END with this image as well:

First of all, in glow, you CANNOT use transparent background. You can if you want, but this would require color overlays, and especially in this case the glow is round and blends into the alchemy circle, and in order for it to blend in, I need the actual background. In most glows you need the background to make it look nice.
  Create a circle, (at least I want the alchemy circle to be glowing, so I used the custom shape tool and created a circle on top of the alchemy circle.

Now I opacify it a bit (right click layer-->blending options to change the opacity), to see the background under it a little. This doesn't have to be the actual glow color, but I just want just so that I can see what I need to erase around.

I want to erase the hand under the alchemy circle. Since I don't want the hand to glow, just the alchemy circle. Remember to erase everything which you DON't want to glow. I left a little triangular bit in the middle of his fist, since I want it to glint his armor a bit

Now I opacify it a bit more, to make the highest glow possible. Meaning, when I animate it, this glow will be the maximum of yellow, before decreasing again. I add a bit of satin, and outer glow, and this is what I came up with (its around the opacity of 20%):

Now what comes next is easy. The layer is the circle right (it should be in a new layer) so just memorize the maximum opacity, (let's say 20%). It should look like this :
Okay, so after this, decide how many frames must work their way up to this image. Since this is the maximum image it will be the last image. I decided I want a mere 4 frames before this, so I named it "05.gif"
Done? Now the rest part is all simple. Click on the layer with the overlay, and just change the opacification lower a bit, lets say, "15%" and then save this as "04.gif", as shown below:

Now, keep doing this, until you get to 0%. So do it 3 more times, saving each lower opacity, so I picked, lets say "10%", "5%" and then "0%". Save all of these "03.gif", "02.gif", "01.gif" working downwards. You don't have to name all these frames this way, but I do to keep track of things, you can always work upwards too, like from 0% saving as 01.gif to 5% saving as 02.gif, and so forth. Whatever works for you. It's better to know the maximum value however.