This section will cover the first scenario. There are two ways to do this: import frames you have already prepared or create your animation from scratch in Photoshop. Now all you have to do is fill the Timeline with multiple frames to simulate movement. Your first frame will already be set up, made of all of the visible layers (meaning the layer visibility, or eye icon, is switched on) in your document. If you have your still images already prepared, click on the hamburger menu icon in the timeline and select Make Frames from Layers In the center of the panel, click on the arrow to open the dropdown menu, and select Create Frame Animation. This will open a panel in the lower third of the canvas. Set up the timeline window for a frame animation Step 2: Import your image files into Photoshop Color modeįinally, animated GIFs are made for the screen, so set your color mode to RGB color. I went with 300 since I know my GIF isn’t going to be that big.

To keep the file size as low as possible, a resolution of 150 is fine. Set up the dimensions, resolution, and color mode of your Photoshop document Dimensionsįor this project, we are working with a banner ad GIF, which has standard sizing guidelines. In general, somewhere in the region of 600px-800px is fine for a square image. Even if your only ambition is to create a shareable GIF for your friends on social media, letting the size of your photos or video dictate the size of your document might make the file larger than you need it to be, which translates into a poor quality GIF. Step 1: Set up the dimensions and resolution of your Photoshop document Without further ado, here’s how to make an animated GIF in Photoshop. Learn how I made this GIF! Photo via graham wizardo. These frames are what we’re going to build in this tutorial in order to animate a killer banner ad GIF. Find a GIF off the internet and drag it into Photoshop, and you will see the separate frames that make up the animation. Just like classic animation, an animated GIF is made up of a series of still images played sequentially to create the illusion of movement. There are many ways to create a GIF, but Photoshop is fast and easy, with built-in tools for image manipulation and animating. A GIF, or “Graphics Interchange Format”, is a compressed image file format that allows for animation.

Photoshop make gif mac