ANIMATION Animated lenticulars are essentially flip lenticulars with less image-to-image change and more frames.

Parallax Printing will assist you in matching your goals with the right approach and help optimize your artwork for maximum effect.

FLIP LENTICULAR (2 PHASE AND MULTI-PHASE) 90 of all lenticulars are made using no more than 2 or 3 frames for effect.

Its often a beforeafter, withwithout or a short narrative sequence.

It can be an incredibly effective approach and has the added advantage of being easy to set up.

Additional frames can be used too, but more than a few frames can sometimes muddy the result.

While many flip lenticulars work as expected there are a few things that are helpful to consider at the design stage if you have the option.

Number of Frames.

In general smaller pieces should use fewer frames because they typically require a finer lenticular lens with limited capacity while larger pieces can often use up to 5 frames with good results.

The more frames you have the quicker the lenticular flips and the more neighboring images will bleed through.

As with many things less is more is often a good strategy.

Looping. If you have a flip sequence with 3 or more frames where there is a visual progression to the images you might consider making a looping sequence.

If you portray a person jumping in the air over 4 frames a viewer walking by will see this repeat several times like this: 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 etc.

There is a hard shift from frame 4 back to frame 1 each time, the jumping person will be in the air and suddenly back on the ground.

But if the image sequence is made into a loop like 1,2,3,4,3,2 it will show the person jumping up and falling back down in a smooth motion.

This is not necessary or always relevant but it can be very effective in the right circumstances.

Ghosting. Bleed through from neighboring images is known as ghosting and happens when a lenticular has a frame with flat areas of light color (or white) and a neighboring frame with a dark object.

Flat areas of light color simply cannot hide things very well and it is common to see neighboring areas show through in these frames between 2-10.

It is much better to have white text on a black background than black text on a white background, for example, and colored text on a photographic background is better still.

Lenticulars with photographic content or active patterns in all frames tend to fare best in controlling ghosting.

The overall degree to which it is considered a problem depends greatly on the intentions of the designer and some people even work with it as a creative variable.

In general Lower LPI lenses tend to handle ghosting better (discussed in the PRINTING section) though they are meant for larger prints because of the coarser surface.

Banding. Ideally a flip from one color to another would happen instantaneously or as a clean gradient but sometimes there can appear subtle vertical bands across the surface of the print.

Banding only happens in the transitions of the piece not in the individual frames and is typically subtle, but for pieces where the color transition is an important feature of the work or for flips between high contrast solid colors it may present as an issue.

The solutions are to avoid flipping between images with solid areas of different colors or try to minimize the issue by choosing colors with similar values.

Photographic content is almost never subject to banding issues, so consider a photo background instead of flat colors if your design allows for it.

Lenticular Effects 4.1