How To Create Animated GIFs With GIMP

[Music] this is nick with logosbynic.com and in this tutorial i'll be demonstrating how you can create your own simple animated gifs using and for this demonstration i'll be showing you how to create this loading spinner icon but once you have an understanding of how this works you should be able to apply these principles to your own designs to start making your own simple animations before we get started if you'd like to learn more about how works i have a collection of over 60 videos where i go over all of the tools and features in and i explain what they are and demonstrate how they work i'll put a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out so to get us started here in the first thing i want to do is create a new document so i'll come up here to where it says file and click on new and i want to size this at 600 by 600 and that's in pixels so go ahead and type that in 600 by 600 pixels click ok and there we have our new document so what i want to do now is start creating some rectangles to create this spinner so to do that let me create a new layer and add it to the background layer right here in this icon that says create a new layer and add it to the image click on that leave the defaults as they are click ok and i'm going to grab the rectangle select tool which is over here and i'm going to click and drag on the canvas to create a rectangle and an elongated rectangle vertically like that and over here you want to make sure you have rounded corners enabled by default they should make sharp corners like that if you just take this box that says rounded corners and take the radius and bring this up all the way to the right you get this nice rounded corner like that and what i want to do now is fill this in with whatever the foreground color is which is black by default so we'll come up here to where it says edit fill with fg color and we'll go to select none and now i want to make the layer i want to shrink the layer so that it's the size of this rectangle here so i'll come up here to where it says layer and go to crop to content and now what i want to do is grab the alignment tool which is over here and where it says relative to make sure you have it set to image click on the rectangle to select it and where i want to align it is to the top align top edge of the target and then align the center of the target up here so that it's in the middle and up top and now i want to duplicate that layer i'm going to come down here to this little icon that says create a duplicate of the layer and add it to the image click on that and now click on that layer click on that object to select that with the alignment tool and let's align that to the bottom so now we have the top and the bottom we're going to merge these two together and then just rotate them around in a circle to create copies going all around so i'm going to come up here to this top layer and we're going to look for this icon over here that says merge merge this layer with the first visible layer below it click on that and there you go now this is one layer so what i want to do now is create a duplicate of this layer right next to that the other icon is another icon that says create a duplicate of the layer and add it to the image click that and now i want to grab the unified transform tool which is over here or you could press shift t on the keyboard a lot of these icons they all look the same so you might have trouble distinguishing them just press shift t on the keyboard and there you go and now i want to rotate this around so i'm going to bring the cursor outside of the image over here and i'm going to click and drag to start rotating this around and i'm going to hold shift so it locks it onto 15 degree increments like that i want to bring this one two one two all right so two steps one two two steps clockwise like that then press enter to finalize that and now i wanna repeat that process again i wanna duplicate that layer and then just click and drag again hold shift one two press enter and do the same thing again just duplicate that layer rotate this around holding shift to lock it onto the uh 15 degree increments like that i'm just going to go through and do this probably have to create one more copy and there we go press enter so now we have these uh rectangles going around in a circle i'm going to merge these all down using this icon right here birch the layers i'm going to merge these all down so that they're one layer like that don't merge it with the background now we're going to take the background and we're going to press we're going to click the uh delete this layer icon over here on the bottom right we're going to get rid of the background and now i want to just shrink down the size of this layer so we'll go to layer and i'll click on [Music] layer to image size right there and now what i want to do is turn off the visibility of that layer and create a new layer on top of it click ok and now i want to right click that original layer and i want to go to alpha to selection that's going to create a selection going around those rectangles and then come up here and basically what i want to do is i want to create two copies of this design right here one in light gray and one in dark gray and the dark gray is going to be used for the animation the light grays are going to be used as like the background sort of so i want to set a foreground and a background color here the foreground color i'm going to make this like a dark shade of gray you could change that over here using these sliders i'm going to use a dark gray like that actually no i'll start with the light gray i'll go with a light gray like this click ok and then go to edit fill with foreground color which is right here fill with fg color and now i want to create another layer on top of that and do the same thing create a new layer add it to the image okay and i want to fill this one with a darker gray so let me click on the uh let me click on this color again right here and i'm going to make this a little darker or actually a lot darker we want to be able to distinguish it from the other parts click ok edit fill with foreground color fill with fg color and what i want to do is take this original layer and let's get rid of that by clicking the delete button and i want to give these two layers names i want to double click this name right here i'm going to name this light gray light gray and i want to name this one dark gray press enter and i want to turn off the visibility of both of these now what i'm going to do is i'm going to clear the selection i'm going to go to select none and basically what i'm going to do is the way animations work in is that for every layer that you create every layer represents a frame in the animation so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create 12 different layers for 12 different frames for each one of those individual rectangles so i'm going to create a duplicate here of the dark gray copy and i'm going to create a duplicate here of the light gray again clicking the duplicate layer and i'm going to click and drag this up so that the dark gray copy and the light gray copy are above and below each other like this and i want to turn on the visibility of the light gray copy and i want to delete this top rectangle right here so i'm going to grab the eraser tool make sure you select a solid brush like this and you can adjust the size over here if you notice the size of my brush it's bigger than the uh width of that rectangle right there you can control the size using the left and right bracket keys i'm going to bring the bracket key up like that you can see and i bring it down like that looking pretty good now i can just go and erase this top one like that and now i want to take this top layer over here turn the visibility turn on the visibility of that and then erase every other rectangle except for this one right here so i'm going to erase the rest of these using the eraser tool just go through and get rid of all that and now what i want to do is merge that down with the original layer so i'll click this merge icon right here merge this layer with the first visible layer below it and then i want to double click this and rename it to one i'm just going to name it one i'm going to name each layer by a number and each each of these numbers is going to represent frames in the animation so let's turn off the visibility of that now we're gonna go and repeat the process we're gonna do the same thing only for this one then for this one and for this one and you get the idea so let's turn off the visibility of this i'm gonna take the dark gray create a copy of that bring it to the top take the light gray create a copy of that bring that to the top just beneath the dark grey copy turn on the visibility of the light grey copy now let's erase this one right here because that's the next one in the uh animation sequence select this layer turn this on select every other rectangle except for this one right here go through and erase these like that and there you go now i'm going to merge this one down just like we did with the other one click this merge icon merge this layer down and i'm going to double click this and i'll name this two and now i'll turn off the visibility of this so you should probably get the idea now i'll go through this sequence one more time just to help you understand it better take it make a copy of the dark gray layer bring it to the top make a copy of the light gray layer bring that to the top turn on the visibility the next one in this sequence is this one right here so i'll erase this one select this layer and delete everyone except for that one right there go through and delete that merge this down with this icon right here merge the layer double click the name and name it three press enter and you get the idea what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go through and create the rest of these there's 12 frames in total for each of these rectangles so i'll go through and do those real quick and then i'll catch up with you when i'm done okay so i have finished up going through the entire image and making a frame for each one of these individual layers and what i want to do is just turn on the visibility of all of them here 1 through 12 as you can see and i'm gonna take the dark gray layer delete that take the gray the light gray layer and delete that so now we have frames one through twelve and this is gonna represent each individual frame of the um the animation so now it is time to export this as an animated gif to do that we'll go to file i'm going to choose export as and i'm going to name this animated gif and just type in gif you want to type in gif for the file extension or you can come down here select file type by extension and look for a gif in the list i think it's easier to type in gif click export and you're going to get this export menu that populates or should populate in just a minute here and over here this is important where it says as animation you want to make sure you have this box ticked right here by default it should be unticked we want to make sure this is exporting as an animation so go ahead and take that down here this is the the uh the delay between frames when unspecified this is the amount of time that passes between each frame in the animation i'm just going to leave the default as it is which is 100 or maybe it's 200 i think i used 100 manually for another project but i'm just going to leave this as it is use 100 200 whatever it is and then down here this is important as well frame disposal or unspecified we want to make sure we choose one frame per layer otherwise it's going to use cumulative layers where it creates an animation out of all of them i want to make it so that each layer is visible on its own in each frame of the animation so i'm going to choose one frame per layer and then i'll go ahead and click export give it a second to do its thing if it's a larger animation it may take a few minutes and i'm going to go ahead and open this i have this open to my other monitor let me just grab this and there you go there we have our animated uh loading spinner that we created with so i think that should do it for this tutorial that's how you can go about creating some very simple animated gifs using if you have any questions just leave a comment below and as always thanks for [Music] watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 160,032

Keywords: animated gifs gimp, logos by nick, logosbynick

Id: GwLHzxSTnoo

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021