How to Create an Animated GIF in Photoshop CS6 Tutorial

In this Adobe tutorial from SoftwareMedia, Kyle shows us how to make an animated gif in Photoshop CS6.

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Closed Caption:

everybody welcome back to another
tutorial from software media.com my name
is kyle and resident multi media guru
here and i want to show you guys how to
make an animated gif in Adobe Photoshop
cs6 for the purposes of this tutorial
I've already got an image that i created
over in Photoshop just a silly little 1i
one-horned flying purple people eater
and in order to facilitate the animation
process the three separate pieces that i
have that i'm going to animate mainly
his I head and his jaw are all separated
into different layers so that i can
manipulate them independently
now that's going to make animating way
easier
so pro tip if you're animating make sure
all your different things are on
separate layers
ok so in order to start our animation
we're going to do is we're going to go
to window
calm down here to timeline this is going
to pop up and it's going to show you the
different layers that you're working
with and this is kind of laid out like
any video editing program like premier
final quantity like that to fall to
about five seconds I don't want it to
run the whole five seconds so i'm gonna
click my little workspace here and i'm
going to drag it down to two seconds and
then when i export this is all it's
going to do and now it's set to about 30
frames per second which is standard for
video so every every second is going to
have 30 separate frames so first I want
to animate his I make him looking back
and forth around a bit
so I'm going to come down here to the
lair for my eyeball
I'm going to expand this and I want to
mess with the position attribute this
little stopwatch right here means you're
enabling keyframes when you see an
animation are the main points of the
animation are called keyframes and
everything in between those key frames
is called between so I want to set the
keyframe and that's going to be telling
the program where i want my where I want
my image to be at that particular point
in time
so I'll give you an example right now i
just created a keyframe and so this
I ball is going to be exactly you know
where it is right now during this
keyframe and then i'm going to move
ahead
maybe about 15 frames which is half a
second and i'm going to click this
little button here and create another
key frame and then while i'm on this
keyframe i'm going to move the I to
where I wanted to be
you'll see it's going to create all the
tweens in between those two keyframes if
I wanted to pause i'm going to create
another key frame without moving this
eyeball and i'm going to come over here
to about the one and a half second mark
and as soon as I move this layer because
keyframes are enabled it will create a
new keyframe and now i'm gonna go to the
end and I'm just going to bring it to
the end and I'm just going to bring his
I back to the center and it
automatically creates keyframe because I
moved it
while keyframes are enabled so now i'm
gonna head come back to the beginning
and hit the spacebar and it animates his
eyeball
now I want to move his jaw I'm going to
go back to the beginning
I'm going to collapse my eyeball layer
I'm going to expand my jaw layer
now once again i'm going to want to
enable keyframes it's going to create
the initial key frame
I'm gonna go to maybe ten frames and i'm
going to drum to move his job where I
wanted to go
that's going to create a new keyframe
and i'm going to go to another frame
going to move the job a little
ja back do it again just to kind of make
it almost looks like it's here it's a
talking motion go to my final frame and
I'm gonna bring his jaw back up
now that I've got my animations uh my
basic animation set
you're gonna want to export it so let me
close this out
I'm going to come up here to file save
for the web
let's assume this out a little bit okay
and then you're going to make sure that
you're set to gif dinner if you want to
try if you want the background
transparent like you would with an
emoticon and you're going to click
transparency
make sure your colors are set to as high
as they can go you're not going to need
to worry about interlaced unless you're
importing this gift into an actual
interlaced video preview monitor color
metadata you don't need to worry about
make sure your image size the size you
want it % size is going to be 100 you're
going to save gonna go to desktop or
wherever and then name it whatever
purple people eater gifts
save it
go to our desktop click on that we're
going to open it with whatever browser
you've got so many use firefox watch
again
there you go it's really really simple
so play around with it you know on have
fun create your own animated gifs with
photoshop if you want to get really
creative you can go you can do much more
complex things with it but this is just
the basics if you want to get really
crazy get after effects and play around
2d animation you have much more control
over your key frames and moving animated
elements and you may even have this
really cool puppet tool where you can
warp the images but that will be a
different tutorial
so go forth create animations and you
know what if you if you come up with
anything cool post on our Facebook page
facebook.com / software media we always
love to see creative stuff from our
customers so thanks for joining us my
name is kyle and we'll see you next time