Hello, I would like to make some experimental animations with my artwork, similar to this artist Laleh Khorramian's Epic Animations | ART21 "New York Close Up" - YouTube (skip to 3 minutes in to see the actual animations). I’ve only been doing stop motion frame by frame and would like to import photos of my paintings and drawings and animate them digitally, which I think is what she is doing. Sorry, I don’t know all the terminology yet! But I know a little bit. I know the different between raster and vector.
I downloaded opentoonz first and yikes, it is too much for me. Synfig looks like a more reasonable learning curve.
Does it support transparency? Like, I can erase parts of the photos to make shapes and then animate those? Is it just for the actual animating, like, I will have to do all of the image preparation in something like photoshop and import png files?
Thank you for your time.
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I have used pngs for my character assets, so yes it does.
Okay, that’s enough for me to jump in! Thank you
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Welcome among us for this new adventure 
In order to delete some parts of the photos, you will have to use masking layers above your image in a group layer.
You can even use an image as mask to reprensent the complex-shaped transparency)
For the transparency itself, you have to modify the parameter “Opacity” (1=Full opacity, 0=Full transparency). It can be even applied to a Group Layer itself.
You can prepare pieces of images and assemble them doing cut-out animation and you could join them with Skeleton Layer and Skeleton Deformation Layer
Always remember that in Synfig, almost everything is based on Group Layers and their hierarchy
P.S.: You will find lots of easy-to-understand tutorials on the youtube channel of @Khemardi 
(don’t forget to subscribe!)
Thank you so much for taking the time to explain that, I will give it a try and check out the videos. 