HOW DO I DO ANIMATED GIFS?

Hi spence. I’m no expert but this should help. I just figured this out and created my first animated gif yesterday (see my avatar).

Basic steps:
1) create the frames you want to animate, I suggest using PhotoShop
2) put them together with a animated gif assembly program, see links below
3) optimize the gif

I think it’s important to utilize a background to keep the file size down. This is the portion of your gif that doesn’t change and is reused. In mine it’s the car, then each additional frame I created was the smoke. I had to include the portion of the car that is behind the smoke. I found that if I didn’t include that portion of the car the smoke was not transparent and had a very defined edge, I can’t explain why.

To get down to the 6KB limit I had to reduce the number of colors to 18, which worked ok with my gif. I used seven frames, one with the car and six for the smoke.

I found this site helpful:
http://www.animationfactory.com/help/tutorial_gif.html

I used the trial version of Gif Movie Gear that they suggested:
www.gamani.com


Does anyone know of good free gif assembly programs?

I'm not sure if you are aware that Image Ready, a part of Photoshop 7/CS, allows you to create your frames, set the size, timing, color etc., and save them as optimized for the web. If you already knew this, my apologies for taking up your time. But I thought
I better check just to be sure you weren't missing anything that was already included in Photoshop. If you are using Photoshop elements, then you won't have access to Image Ready, and your hunt for a good animator will hopefully be successful.
Pat(Patre)
Also there are probably better animators out there than Image Ready, but I don't know of any free ones except The GIMP program for windows. I used it, and it produced satisfactory animations.

What

I did not know that, I've never used Image Ready. Thanks Patre