Hello! I'm Cristina from Elan Creative
Co and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to make simple animated
GIFs in Photoshop. I'm going to make the intro for this video and then I'm going
to show you how to save the animation as a GIF and as a video. I'm going to
make the first frame and then i want to make small changes to it and create 4
other frames. I want to have 5 frames. We are going to work with the Layers panel,
so if you can see it you can open it from Window > Layers or by pressing f7. Now
I'm going to click on the padlock next to the background and unlock the layer.
Then I am going to switch to the Paint Bucket tool, select this very light pink,
and change the background color. I'm going to switch to the Type tool, the
shortcut is T, and I want to write "how to make gifs in Photoshop", the title of this
tutorial. So i am going to use this gold and I am using the Just Awesome font
family because I'm going for a hand-drawn look. You can make really great-looking
GIFs using your hand lettering. So let's type "how to make". Now I am going to
switch to Just Awesome Regular font, and let's make it bigger,
probably 300 points, and let's type GIFs. Now this font family doesn't have other
weights, so I am going to use the Character panel to make it thicker and let's make the S a little bit smaller.
Now I want to type... Let's make this also 150 and change the weight. This needs to
be smaller, maybe 100. Okay! So this is what I want. Now let's
select all of them and make sure they're centered. This looks great!
The next step is to change the colors of these letters and then add a texture to
it to get that hands-on feel. So let's select the Type tool again and change the
colors. I like how this looks. So the last step is to add a texture. I'm going to
create a new layer. The new layer is on top of all the other layers, and then I'm
going to switch to this off-white, and using the Brush tool and a texture I
made, I am just going to add this to the animation. I really love the way this
looks so I am going to switch back to the Selection tool, I'm going to select
all the layers, and then click here to add them to a folder. This will be my
first frame. So let's call it Frame 1. Now select the group and drag it to the new
layer button and rename it Frame 2. This will be our second frame, and I am just
going to make a few small changes. First I'm going to delete the texture because
I want to have different textures. Well, I'm going to use the same brush, but I
want it to be a bit different for each frame. Then I'm going to switch to the
Type tool and change the colors in the word GIFs. Now I'm going to create a new layer,
switch to the off-white, and then to the Brush tool, and maybe let's make this
brush a bit bigger. I use the bracket keys to make the brush bigger or smaller.
And I'm going to apply it to the frame. Now I'm going to make another copy of
the frame and call it Frame 3. So again I'm going to change the colors
and add a different texture. Now that we have 5 frames we can start making the
animation. You can make as many frames as you want, but keep in mind that the more
frames you have, the larger your file will be. So if you want to add it to your blog
you shouldn't have a very large file. If you want you can right click on the
frames and merge the groups. I like to keep them as groups because I can go
back in and make changes to them if I need to. We can make animations from the
timeline panel. Just go to Window > Timeline to open it. Make sure you click
on Create Frame Animation. If Creative Video Timeline is at the top, click on
the arrow and then switch to Create Frame Animation, then click on it to open
the panel. The timeline is open and we already have a frame. The first frame is
actually the layer or the group that's on top. So if you want you can change the
order of the layers or even change the order of the frames. Next, I want to
change the delay between frames, the time each frame is visible. I am going to
switch to 0.2 seconds. You can also change this later, but if you have many
frames, it's better to do it in the beginning. Make sure you change the
looping options from Once or 3 times to Forever. That
will create that GIF effect that goes on forever. Then create a copy of
the first frame by dragging it to the Duplicate Frame icon and then go to the
Layers panel and make the first frame invisible. So as you can see this is the
first and this is the second. Now create another copy and make the second frame
invisible. Do the same for all the other frames. So now we have five different
frames. If you have too many frames then using this manual method might be too
time-consuming. So you can merge each group and then go to the Timeline
settings and click on Make Frames from Layers. I cannot do that now because I
made each group into a frame. To test your GIF, just click on the play button. As
you can see, it looks great. The colors are changing and you can also
see that the texture is a bit different. Now click on stop to close it. And if you
want, you can also play with the width or size of your font, or just rotate it for
a little bit. You can create a really great effect if you use your own hand
lettering. If you are satisfied with your animation, let's save it. So go to File >
Export > Export for web. If you are using an older version of Photoshop, this
option might be under Save as. So let's change the preset to GIF. The first
option is usually the best one, especially if you have many colors. Now
it's really important to take a look at the size of the GIF, and if it's too big
you might want to compress it or maybe remove some of the layers.
Another important thing, if you want to upload your GIF to WordPress, make sure the
image size is the same size as the area where you want to use it. So for example,
if I want to use this GIF in a blog post, I am going to make it 800 by 450
pixels. That's because the width of my blog
post area is 800 pixels. If the GIF is larger than your blog post area or your
sidebar, WordPress will resize it and instead of saving the animation it will
only save the first image so your GIF won't be a GIF anymore. Then click Save
and search for a place on your computer to save it. Now to test it, just drag it
into a browser and as you can see the GIF works. I want to use this animation
on Instagram so I'm going to make a few changes to it. First Instagram works
better with square images so I'm going to go to Image > Canvas Size and resize it.
Let's change to pixels and I want to make it 1000 by 1000 pixels. This option
will not change the size of my image, it will only change the size of my canvas.
That's very important because it will not distort the image. Click on Proceed and
as you can see I have this empty space here so I am going to create a new layer
and then just fill it with the same color as the background. So now each
layer is the same color. You should also use videos that are at least 5 seconds
long on Instagram. My video is only 1 second long so I will have to make 5
other copies of this, well 4 other, so I'm going to select all of them and just
create another copy. So now I have 2 seconds, 3 seconds, 4 seconds, and finally
5 seconds. So if I want to save this as a GIF, this will be much larger than my
other GIF. To save it as a video, just go to File > Export > Render Video.
You can change the settings if you want, and maybe rename it, and then press
Render to save it. So let's test the video. This looks really pretty actually.
I really love that vintage look it has because of the texture. Hope you enjoy
making GIFs! If you want to see more Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials,
don't forget to subscribe to my channel. Thanks for watching!
