Making an animated gif is not as hard as it looks to do this you’re going to need a few things. The first thing  you’re going to need is Photoshop. In my tutorial I’ll be using Photoshop CS4.  Next you’re going to need a video of some sort and you’re going to need QuickTime player for testing purposes.  Also some Photoshop knoledge would be helpful.

1. You’re going to need to find out if your video will play in QuickTime. Why you ask? Well Photoshop uses QuickTime as its video player if your video won’t play in QuickTime then you may need a codec for it or  the file might be a proprietary format (i.e., avi, wmp). In that case you will most likely need to convert the video to a .mov. I’ll explain how to do that in a later post.

2. Once you confirm that your video plays in QuickTime then you can go ahead and open up Photoshop and go to file>> Import>> Video frames to layers. Find your video and click load. The video I’m using is a mountain bike video called “Seasons – by the collective”

3. If your video is under a minute, it you should be ok to select “from beginning to end” (skip step 4).  If it’s a long video then chose “selected range only”

4. Play and find the start of the clip you want. Then hold shift and move the slider to the end of the clip that you want.

5. The next option is limit to every 2 frames.  This means it will take a picture every 2 frames.  For a fast moving video like mine you don’t want to take out too many frames.  For a slower movie you could increase this to every 5 or 6 frames.  In my example I chose every 2 frames.

6. Make sure the “Make frame animation” is check marked and then click OK.

Give Photoshop some time to get the frames and load. If you have a slow computer and the video is at a high resolution this could take a little while. After it loads it’s just down to some basic editing.

7. After it loads it’s just down to some basic editing. You can remove frames from the beginning or end, and resize the image.
8. The phrase “always leave them wanting more” applies to animated gif’s. The key to a good gif is the loop of video where you can’t find the start or end. Have a look at mine for example it looks like he is on a trail that will never end.

9. In order to save your gif, you have to do it a little different than just normally saving a document.  Go to File >> Save for web and devices.

10. Everything by default should be good to go for you but there are some options on the bottom that could be helpful in keeping the file size down. The first is the size, and the second is the Quality.

Save and your done.

If you have any questions please leave a comment below and I’ll try to help you out.

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