wonder if anyone knows a program where i can combined my gifs with still image siggys, thanks ahead of time guys

The later versions of Adobe Photoshop, probably.

Hey LMS, I know you don't have Photoshop, so this probably won't help you, but kiki suggested I do a tutorial of sorts for this kind of thing anyway.. so maybe someone will find it useful

I use Photoshop CS5, although not much has changed in the past few versions with respect to the functionality I'm about to explain. Prior to CS3 (I think?), Photoshop used to come with another piece of software which handled all of this, called ImageReady. Its features have now been merged into Photoshop though.

Animation in Photoshop

The animation palette

The first thing to do is to open the Animation palette, which may not be visible by default. To do this, go to Window > Animation.

If the palette looks like this, with "ANIMATION (TIMELINE)" as the heading, click the button in the bottom right (circled) to instead convert it to a frame animation.

This is what it should look like, in a document that only has 1 frame:

A: Frame number

B: Frame delay (how many seconds this frame should be visible for)

C: Looping options for the animation. You can make it repeat forever, or just make it play through a certain number of times then stop

D: Play controls, to preview the animation as you're working on it

E: Duplicate Frame button. This will duplicate the currently selected frame and insert it directly after

F: Context menu. You'll find most of the other functionality you need in here

Frames and layers

The most important thing to know here is that for each frame of your animation, for the most part you're not actually manipulating the content of any layers - you're instead just changing which layers are visible at any one time.

For example, in an animation like this:

There is not just a single layer here which is changing colours each frame. Instead there are 3 layers - a red, a green and a blue.

In Frame 1, only the red layer is visible and the other two are hidden:

Similarly for Frames 2 and 3:

Importing videos

I generally don't do it this way, but you can import videos directly into Photoshop.

1. Go to File > Import > Video Frames to Layers

2. Browse to the video file. If you can't find it in the file browser, then it's probably an unsupported video format and you won't be able to import it directly

3. If you want to use the whole video leave "From Beginning to End" selected, otherwise choose "Selected Range Only" and select the portion of the video you want to keep

4. If the video preview is blank as you move the slider along, then the video format is not supported

5. Make sure "Make Frame Animation" is checked

6. Click OK

Importing frames

Rather than importing the video directly as explained above, I usually first crop out the frames in another program called VirtualDub. I just prefer it that way because of the precision and control, and the ability to select multiple ranges of frames. From there I export my frames as an image sequence, so I end up with a different image for each frame. Now to get these into Photoshop..

1. Go to File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack

2. Browse to the images and select them all

3. Click OK and let the script run through, and you'll end up with the entire image sequence loaded into a Photoshop document, with each image in a different layer

4. In the Animation palette, go to the context menu and select Make Frames From Layers

5. Again from the context menu, select Reverse Frames

Adding elements on top of a video animation

Now that you have the video set up as a frame animation, you can easily add text or whatever you want on top.

1. Make sure you're working on Frame 1

2. In the Animation palette context menu, make sure "New Layers Visible in All Frames" is ticked

3. In the Layers palette, make sure "Propagate Frame 1" is ticked

Now, anything you add on top will remain visible across the entire animation as the video plays underneath:

Frame 1

Frame 3

thank you Donbot (Y)

I am not sure I understand everything (so u might keep going on doing me few set in the future )

but It's going to be very useful once I download (legally of course!) photoshop on my computer again

yay I wanted to learn it for sooo long!

Thanks Don!

Thank you Donbot, this helped a lot

I might have to download photoshop CS, even though it is expensive! I currently have a gif animation software, it cost me about $30-40, it is very easy to use and the gifs are GREAT until I save the actual Gif, then the quality is grainy and there's random marks over certain parts of the gif. It is pretty damn annoying.

^Photoshop isn't going to help with that. GIFs have a colour limit of 256, and with that limitation there's always going to be unwanted compression. It's more noticeable in some animations than others - it really depends on the content. There are some options you specify which will change the way the GIF compensates for the lack of colour. I've saved all these with only 128 colours too, so you can see it more clearly (it's most noticeable on the gradient background):

No dither:

Pattern dither:

Noise dither:

It should also be noted that you can get better quality with black & white GIFs, since there's naturally less colours to adjust for. In fact, there are only 256 shades of grey possible in RGB anyway, so if you save with maximum colour resolution you won't lose any quality at all

(This is still 128 colours)

I know about the 'dither' setting, and also know to uncheck the merging of palletes (I think it's called palletes) but I guess the thing is..I see gifs on tumblr that are clear as can be and when I make them with the software I have, they're clear while I play the gif within the software but after I save and upload it, poor quality. I've read what you've said about the colors though. Its tricky because if I make an animation, and then export each slide as an image individually, and then upload it on some online gif animators...the gif turns out more clear.

Thanks for all the info though donbot. I've just heard the settings for photoshop cs5 allow for much clearer gifs, maybe I'm misinformed.

^Maybe it's just shit software after all then

Hard to know without seeing it, but hey you can always download a trial version of Photoshop if you just want to test it out

I know this isn't the appropriate thread to ask this, but people are replying here:

Could anyone please tell me how to cut gifs into a diagonal like this?

I've been looking for it for ages

^I did a tutorial of how to combine two GIFs together in this thread:

In that I used a gradient mask to blend the two pictures together, but you could just as easily make a straight diagonal cut on the mask instead, or whatever else you might want to do with it

Ah thank you for the quick response

I understand how to blend them together, but I don't understand how to cut a gif in any other size from a square or a cirlce, let alone a diagonal or what you just did there!

What software are you using? Do you know how layer masks work?

I'm using Photoshop CS5.

I have a very basic knowledge of it, but I can google the parts I don't understand I hope

You can think of a mask as a screen that sits over a layer and controls which parts of it are visible. You work on the mask in black & white - anything in white means that part of the layer will be visible, and anything in black means that part of the layer will be hidden.

Example - layer mask is completely white, so all parts of the layer are visible

Example - layer mask is completely black, so all parts of the layer are hidden

Examples - showing how all the black parts of the layer mask hide that part of the layer

So in that other thread I linked before, I showed how to put one animation inside a layer group, and sitting on top of a second animation. All you have to do from there is add a mask to the layer group, then you can cut the topmost animation into whatever shape you want. I hope that helps

This is so freaking perfect!

Thank you, I can use this is so many ways