How to Make a GIF in Photoshop from Videos or Photos Quickly

Make a GIF in Photoshop from Videos or Photos

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can make a GIF in Photoshop from a series of images. Also, you will see how easy and quick it is to make a GIF in Photoshop from a video clip. See how you can export your GIF so you can share it on social media. Creating an animated GIF in photoshop is easy and fast.

How to Make a GIF From a Video Clip

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how easy it is to make animated GIFs in Photoshop from videos or a sequence of still images. The first thing I want to do is to preview the video I would like to turn into an animated GIF. There’s a few seconds of some friends jumping in water. OK, we’ll stop that.

And so now I can either drag the video into Photoshop or go to file open and navigate to where the video is. I’m going to drag the clip into Photoshop and as soon as I drop the video clip into Photoshop, you see that in the layers panel it created a video group.

And also down here at the bottom you see that Photoshop created a timeline for the video clip. Now if you don’t see that timeline come up and you can come up here to window timeline and there it is.

Now would be a good time to check to see how large a file is. We can do this by coming here to image image size. You can have a GIF that could be any size, but the larger the dimensions, the bigger the file size. So here’s where you can resize it. GIFs on Twitter or Facebook are usually a lot smaller.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to change this to percent and put in 50%. And you can see here the dimensions it’s 960 pixels by 6:40 pixels so a lot smaller and the file size went to 1.48 megabytes. It was 5.93 megabytes. We’ll go with this size and say OK. It says transforming the video layer requires converting it to a smart object layer. We’re going to do that, say convert and I’m going to double click on the hand tool to bring the video up to the screen size.

And now we need to trim the video and save it as an animated GIF. So now in the timeline I’m going to come down here and put my cursor on the playhead and kind of scrub through where I want this video to start. And I think that should be good right there. And I want to trim this video. I’m going to click down here on the front of the clip and drag this over till it snaps to the playhead and let go.

And now I want to move my playhead a little bit further somewhere right about there. And then click at the opposite end of the clip and drag my playhead over. And now I’m going to click the play button to see my results. And I’ve got them jumping in right before the. Water it stops. Once you hit the play button, if you don’t see it continuously loop, you can come over here to the playback options and make sure loop playback is checked. So there is my preview of how it looks.

So now we need to export our GIF file. You come here to file export an you save for web legacy and you get this dialog box here. Make sure that GIF is selected up here at the top. Most of these default values are going to be OK. Colors 256. You don’t need transparency. Uncheck that. Make sure convert to sRGB is checked. Here’s the size that we had already set it to earlier. Quality we can leave it there at bicubic. And just make sure that animation looping options says forever. Can play it again, right here.

There’s what are GIF animation looks like and you can just press save and save it to your computer. I had already done this, but let’s save it there. And I can bring you a web browser and just bring it in there and you can see it play. So that is a gift from a video clip. Pretty easy, huh?

How to Make a GIF From a Sequence of Still Images

Now I want to show you how to create an animated GIF from several still images. I’m using seven images from a model posing from a shoot. And sometimes it’s good to know already where you’re going to share your gifts too. I decided I wanted to post these t0 Instagram. So I had cropped all my images to a one to one aspect ratio and set the width and height to 1080 by 1080.

So now I need to bring these seven images into Photoshop. So if I come here to file and down to scripts, load files into stack. And I’m going to navigate to where my images are and select them all and say open. And if you need to you can check this box here that says attempt to automatically align source images. So if you need to, that will help the animated GIF play smoothly. And I’m going to say OK. And here’s the seven images that Photoshop brought in as layers.

And we need to show the timeline. So we’re going to come to window and click on timeline. And so now you see the timeline at the bottom of the screen. Next we need to make sure that create frame animation is selected. Click on it and now Photoshop has created the 1st frame in our timeline.

And now to get the rest of the frames into the timeline. Come over to this flyout menu. And click on make frames from layers. And down here at the bottom make sure that forever is checked because we want our sequence of images to keep on displaying one after another. And now I’m going to select the 1st frame, hold down shift and click on the last frame to select all the frames. And I want to set the time delay of all these frames.

So just to show you if I say no delay and click the play button it goes rather quickly. Going to select them all again and choose another time, say .5, press my play button. Let’s say one second, let’s play again. OK, let’s go with one second. I’m going to save my Photoshop file and it’s going to save it as a PSF file. And just so I have it saved.

And now I want to export my sequence of still images as a GIF. So I want to come up here to file export, save for web legacy and just like in the previous example using the video, I want to make sure that GIF is checked, colors are 256. I don’t need transparency, convert to sRGB should be checked.

Here’s a size for Instagram is going to be a 1080 by 1080 square one to one aspect ratio. And again, I’m making sure that the animation looping options is set to forever. I can scale this down a little bit, press play just to see it OK. And now I can click save and save it out to my computer. And I’m just going to bring it over into a web browser like Safari to show you it. I

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See the previous blog article here ▶️ https://charlescabrera.com/best-overhead-camera-setup-for-youtube-el/