Susie, a photographer friend of mine (www.flashfields.com) recently went for a holiday to South Africa and came back with what at first glance looks like a typical wildlife photo. However her title “Zebra Crossing” put things into context a bit better. Not content with that though I decided to have my own bit of fun with the image. I mean what is a zebra crossing without stripes on the road and flashing beacons?!  I’ve even made this a gif animation and the lights flash!

This final image was actually quite easy to do. I Googled for some images of the beacons and then cut one out. I then duplicated it on the same layer and mirrored it so it was the beacon on the other side of the road. Then I got both of those beacons and copied/resized them to go in the background. Ok that’s one set done.

Next I copied that layer and for each light I did an edit with brightness and saturation to make the lights in the on position. I think from memory with the stripes, I just made some rectangles using the Photoshop grid as a guide, and alternated them in black and white. Then I used the free transform tool to distort the rectangle so it matched the perspective of the road. I used a blend mode to make it blend into the road better and a mask on the layer over the zebra legs. The stripes on the road were again rectangles that I made and then distorted like I did the stripes.

Once everything was in place, all I needed to do was make sure I had one layer for the lights on and one for lights off and then in the animation window make each layer a frame, choose the alternating frequency, make it repeat forever and then save it a a gif. It actually sounds quite complicated now I have written it out, but it probably took me half an hour I reckon. Easy when you know how 🙂 Just in case you are interested, as I said, this is a Zebra Crossing, but you also have Puffin Crossings and Toucan crossings.