Animated Gifs
This tutorial is designed to help guide you through the basic steps needed to create an animated GIF, such as one shown below. The software we will be using is Photoshop CS3, which can be found on the computers in the FITC.
This tutorial comes in several parts. Click on the step you wish to learn:
Launching Photoshop
- Go to the desktop and double-click on the
Applications folder, find the Adobe Photoshop CS3 folder and open up CS3.
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Creating an Animation
Before starting any animation, you need to have images. With the example shown at the top of this page, we used two images:
We will refer to the left image as the "student image" and the right one the "Sakai image."
Notice that these two images are the same size. It will make the process easier. Save these to your computer.
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Open both of the images in Photoshop. Go to
File > Open and select your files.
Both files will open up in separate windows, as shown below.
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To make both files be in one document, follow the steps below:
(i) Select the Move Tool (hotkey V) at position 1.
(ii) Click on the image of the student (at position 2) with the tool and Drag it to the Sakai document (position 3).
(iii) Drop the student image on top of the Sakai image by releasing the mouse button.
(iv) Close the original student image (position 2). You should now only have one window open (position 3).
Notice that the Sakai image will be covered by the image of the student. This is supposed to happen!
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Double check your work:
The window at position 3 should have two layers. The Layers Window can be found at the bottom-right hand corner of the screen. If you accidentally closed the Layers window, you can open it up again by going to Windows > Layers.
You will see that the Sakai image is the bottom layer and the student image is the top layer. Just like physical sheets of paper, you can only see the layer on the top. This is why you only see the student image as shown below.
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Open up the Animation Window by going to
Window > Animation. A new window should pop-up at the bottom of the screen. This will help us determine which frames (or sequence of images) will go into the animation and determine the settings (such as pacing) for them. It should look like below:
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Go to the Animation Window and click on your first frame. Find the
Duplicate button at the bottom and click on it. This will create a second frame that looks exactly like the first.
Your animation window should now have 2 frames that look the same (as shown below).
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The next step requires us to hide a layer. To do this, go to the
Layers Window and toggle the Eyeball button to the left of the layer of the student image. This should be the top layer.
After clicking this button, the eyeball will disappear. The student image is now invisible in the document's window and you should only be able to see the Sakai image. Your animation window should look like this:
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Next we need to
Tween our frames, which will effectively cause the images to blur and merge into one another in our animation. To do this, go to the animation window, select frame two, and click the Tween button as shown below.
A new window will pop-up for your Tween options. The most important thing we want to change is the number of frames to add. The higher the number you enter, the smoother the animation. Let us do 10 for now. Click okay once you are done!
Ten new frames will be added to your animation window. It will look like below:
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If you click on the
Play button at the button of the animation window, you will see that your animation run very quickly. This is because each frame is set to play for 0 seconds. To change this, click at the timer drop-down menu located at the bottom of each frame.
Change the time for all of the frames to 0.2 seconds. If you wish to play each frame for longer, feel free to do so. When you hit the play button now, the animation runs a lot slower.
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Next we need to make the student image look as if it is moving across the screen. Go to frame two and select the
Move Tool (hotkey V). Click the student image layer and MOVE the image to the right by 3 pixels. To do this easily, don't click and drag with the mouse. Instead, press the Right Arrow Key three times to move three pixels.
Continue doing this for each frame, except add 3 to the last MOVE you made. For instance, frame two moved to the right 3 pixels. Frame three will now need to move to the right 6 pixels, and frame four will need to move 9 pixels. Do this until to reach the last frame.
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Let's do a bit of cleaning up. Click on the
Magic Wand Tool (hotkey W).
Click on the student image layer from any frame (frame one in this case) and click anywhere in the white background. We will be deleting this background so we don't have an edge showing in the middle of the Sakai image during our animation.
The image on the left shows the white area selected. After you have your selection, press Delete and all of the white background will be deleted. You will then be able to see the Sakai image layer at the bottom. Notice that this action effects all of the other frames as well. Thus, you only need to do this once!
By now you should have half of the animation done needed to duplicate the one found at the top of this page. The animation we just created with 12 frames is much clunkier than the smooth one at the top. This is because the Tweening options used for the top version had 30 frames, thus making the fading transition a lot smoother.
To fade out the Sakai image, we need to do Tweening a second time. The steps to do this are similar to the ones shown above, so we will leave it out of the tutorial.
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Saving the animation
In order to keep the animation of your file, we need to save it differently than how images are normally saved.
- Go to
File > Save for Web and Devices
- A new window will pop up that looks like this.
(1) Your animation: This is your animation
(2) Save type: Click on the drop down menu and select GIF.
(3) Animation Settings:
- Change the looping options to "Forever" if you want the animation to continue running through it's cycle of images.
- Click on the
Play button to preview your animation (will be shown at label 1).
- Click on the
Rewind button (double triangles) to make it start the animation from frame 1.
(4) Save: When you are done editing the necessary fields, click the save button.
- The window in the previous step will be replaced with a new SAVE window. Choose a file name and location for animation file to be saved. Don't change the default format settings. Click
Save once you are done.
Your animation is now saved!
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