Graphics Interchange Format, commonly known as GIF, has become very popular on the social media platform. Whether it is a birthday or a festival, GIF is extensively shared amongst people on social media these days! So, let’s learn how to create an animated GIF using Photoshop!
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Create a new file
To create a new file in Photoshop, go to the ‘File’ menu and click on ‘New’. Keep the width as 1920 pixels and height as 1080 pixels. Give the file name of your choice.
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Adding text
Pick the ‘Text’ tool from the tool panel or just press ‘T’. Next, type ‘Three’. You can change the font of your choice.
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Place an image
To insert an image, go to ‘File’ menu and select the image of your choice from the computer. Here, it is ‘rocket’.
Next, you need to make all the layers invisible.
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Create animation
Go to the ‘Window’ menu, and click on ‘animation’. An open animation pane will appear.
To fill the background with gradient, set the foreground colour as #003663 and the background colour as #0d004c. Next, select ‘Gradient’ from the tool panel.
In the window that appears, select the mode as ‘foreground to background’ and type as ‘radial gradient’ in the options bar.
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Placing the gradient bar
After the above settings are done, all you need to do is just drag the gradient bar from the centre of the screen to the right and then select the background layer.
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Activate and duplicate layer
Click on layer 1 to activate it and duplicate it around 20 times.
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Adjust the position of the rocket
Choose the ‘Grab’ tool from the tool panel. Using this tool and the duplicate layers, place the rocket carefully.
Once this is done, the image will look like something shown in the figure.
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Activate text layer
Now, activate the ‘Three’ text layer and let all other layers be invisible. You can check which layer is activated in the animation panel.
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Duplicate the frame
Click on the ‘duplicate selected frames’ in the animation panel to duplicate the current frame.
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Activate the ‘Two’ layer
Next, click on ‘Two’ text layer and make the ‘three’ layer invisible. The duplicated frame in the animation panel will record the current layers i.e. background and ‘Two’ layer.
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Set the delay
To set the delay between the two frames, click on ‘Select frame delay time’ icon in the animation panel. Keep it as 1 second per frame.
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Duplicate the third frame
Now, repeating the above steps, duplicate the existing frame, but this time, activate the ‘One’ layer and the background layer.
Repeat the same steps with ‘Launch’ layer.
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Animate the image
To do this, duplicate the frame and make the 5th frame. Set the delay as ‘no time delay’. Activate the ‘Layer 1’ and background and make sure that all other layers are invisible.
Repeat these steps for all the 20 duplicate layers of rocket image by creating a new frame each time you select a new layer along with the background.
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Save the file
After the animation is done, we need to save the file with a GIF extension. So, go to the ‘File’ menu and select ‘Save for the web’.
Next, choose the format as ‘GIF’. Change the dimensions to 800 pixels in width. Click on the ‘Save’ option.
Animating a GIF using Photoshop is done!
So, follow these simple steps so that you can animate a GIF using Photoshop yourself and share it with your friends and family! Go creative and follow the trend!
