How to Change FPS in Photoshop Animation

Adobe's Photoshop can be used to edit not only pictures, but also animated images and video files. Photoshop enables you to edit both the image frames themselves and the rate at which they run during playback. Whether you prefer working with individual frames or actual snippets of the file's runtime, there are tools to help you achieve your editing goals.

You can easily change both the runtime and the frame rate of the animation or video. Changing the frame rate can dramatically change animation quality and playback speed, so it's a useful tool to master for getting the most from your animations. To change the frame rate and duration, click "Document Settings" from the Animation panel menu. There are two fields for duration and frame rate -- enter the values you want for these settings.

You can also change just how the animation is displayed on the timeline. There are two options: frame animation and timeline animation. Frame animation mode displays individual frames, which can be edited individually and given unique frame rates and layer properties. Timeline mode displays the animation as a single, continuous timeline that can be edited using keyframes and video layers instead. The preferable mode for your situation ultimately depends on your desired goals and effects, but you can switch between the two during editing at the cost of some interpolated frames when converting. Since both modes are operate differently, they each add a different set of additional tools to the Animation panel. To select a mode, click either "Convert to Frame Animation" or "Convert to Timeline Animation" from the Animation panel.

Frame mode enables a handful of additional tools, mostly related to the frames themselves. These include Looping Options, which control the number of playbacks for animated GIF files, and Frame Delay Time, which dictates the duration of each frame during playback. Frame mode also adds Tween Animation Frames, which adds a series of frames between two existing frames and varies their layer properties evenly, and Duplicate Selected Frames, which duplicates the selected frames and adds the duplicates to the timeline.

Timeline mode adds several tools and workspace indicators, as well as adding tools to the Animation panel for the creation and editing of keyframes. These include the Cached Frames Indicator, which visually displays what frames are cached for playback, and the Comments Track, a series of text comments that appear during playback as tool tips to assist in editing. There are also tools for controlling lighting throughout the animation, navigating between keyframes, and adding additional display bars for the duration of video layers, altered video tracks and timing.