Photoshop Zone

I’ve been fairly obsessed with animated gifs lately. My apologies. It was really If We Don’t, Remember Me that had me stuck in this loop. This person churns out such really interesting visuals, I couldn’t rest until I got something fairly close. I feel like the image above, while not perfect, is close enough to let things rest for a while 1 . Initially, I just thought IWDRM was just a master of choosing just the right clip. Now, that part can’t be discounted but there’s a lot of other things that go on to improve the final product. While fairly simple, I’ll try to detail what I did and how I eventually learned to make it more economical time wise. I’m not a PS guy, so there may be even better ways. If you know them, let me know. This is tilted towards CS4 but I imagine the concepts will make sense if you use other versions or other software. Clip your video down in Quicktime or something like that. You can edit in the PS import tool but it’s awkward. Import...

First things first I don’t use Photoshop or ImageReady. I use Paint Shop Pro 10 and Jasc Animation Shop to produce animated GIF’s. The principles of animation are the same, I believe, no matter what software you happen to use. For that reason, I’ll try to keep the discussion as generic as possible. The example that follows assumes a file size limit of 512k, but the principles described can be applied to any file size. Personal Preference I prefer looping GIF’s. Even GIF’s that are intended to have a beginning and an end should loop, like a movie that runs its course and then runs again. Animations that run their course once and revert to the static image of the final frame may get little attention because the viewer may miss the brief action that occurs early on and isn’t quite sure how to restart the animation. Animations that rely on a simple, dramatic effect don’t work well unless they have the context of a pause or some kind of intermediary frame. Such an anima...