You might have seen some animated photos/ gifs on your instagram or somewhere and wondered how to create a gif. Here’s a simple guide to help you create gifs in Photoshop. If you don’t have Photoshop you can get it as a part of adobe creative cloud (photography plan) here.
Follow these steps to make a GIF in Photoshop
Step 1
First things first. You’ll need to get your sequence of shots. Turn your camera on the highest sequence setting (found in drive mode) most cameras have this option some are faster than others then take your shots. Otherwise you can also use your phone by holding down the shutter button.
Step 2
Import all of your shots for the animation into Lightroom or editing app. Edit your photos in your own style. We use our own Lightroom presets to keep our look consistent.
Make sure all of the crops, size, exposures and colours are the same for each shot by syncing the edits. Export all your edited photos into a folder. Make sure they are not large files, keep them around 600 pixels in height.
Step 3
Open Adobe Photoshop. Go to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack. Click Browse and navigate to where you saved your images, select them all and press open then ok. All your images will now come up as layers in the layer panel at the bottom right. Check that your images (layers) are in the correct order, arrange them with the first frame starting at the bottom of the stack, if they are in the wrong order select them all head to the Layer menu, Arrange, click reverse.
Step 4
Now click the “Window” menu tab at the top and select “Timeline”. In the middle of the new Timeline window that pops up click on the “Create Frame Animation tab”
In the top right corner of that same window click on the timeline menu tab with 4 lines and select “Make Frames From Layers”.
All your images will now come up in order in the timeline. Select them all by clicking on the first image holding down the shift key and click the last image. After selecting all your images click on the small arrow at the bottom of one of the images and select your time delay. The smaller the number the faster the animation. We generally use 0.1 or faster.
Test it by pressing the play button then you can experiment with the times to get the right look.
Step 5
Now its time to export. You have two options here.
A. For instagram you will need to export it as a video to do this click File, Export, Render to Video select the name and where you want to save it and click Render. The video will only play 1 time but instagram will loop it.
B. For an actual GIF file click File, Export, Save For Web and select GIF. Select “Preset” and choose 128 Dithered then select “Colours” choose 256 next in the bottom right adjust the percentage until the file size is around 1mb so it loads faster then click save.
Step 6
Your animated photos will now be saved and you can transfer them to your phone with airdrop, dropbox or email.
Check our other tips & tricks here .
