Everyone loves to make animated banners and with Photoshop's Image Ready program, it's pretty darn easy. Why they don't just include the features in Photoshop is beyond me but still in the same, there is a handy button on your toolbar to take you into Image Ready as you'll see.
Today we'll be learning to make this simple example banner... you can use whatever text you want or images or whatever you want on each layer/frame:
| 1) So first thing is first, we open a new file in the standard banner size of 468x60. |  |
2) To animate anything, you will need to have each frame of you animation on it's own layer. In my example I have several text layers as you can see to the right.  |  3) Once you have each layer/frame of your scene done then you will click that neat little button on the bottom of your toolbar and get sent on a nice disk grinding journey to Image Ready. |
| 4) Once you get to Image Ready, you need to make sure all the right tool boxes and windows are open. |  |
| 5) Once of those windows is the Animation Window. It will open with a single frame, showing whatever layers you left visible when you ported over from Photoshop. Make sure you have only the first frame of your animation visible now (a layers window is open in Image Ready too if you had everything checked as shown in step 4) and then set the amount of time you want that frame to be displayed by clicking on the area I circled in red. | ||||||||
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| 10) To save the file it has to be optimized as some form of GIF (jpegs and other formats don't allow animation sequences without some fancy Java work). For this example I chose a pretty compressed scheme. You can mess around with whatever setting make it look good for you here and then hit the little play button on the animation window to see how it'll look under the optimized tab. |  |
| 11) Finally you just have to save the optimized, animated gif. That about does. You've animated your first gif. Do you feel special? I do. |  |
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