Equipment

By Dom Lake

Posted As a group we were thinking of different ways to add some simple touches to our blogs, one of which was the animated .GIF's. These were really simple and easy to make although quite time consuming.

The basic idea is to make a background that is completely blank and place the item that you wish to animate in the center of the set, we then took a photo and then rotated the item around a 1/12 of a turn, the more photos will mean a smoother animation but 12 is enough.
After the photos have been taken we then imported them to a computer and loaded all the 12 images into photoshop layers in the same image as you can see here. This is simple to do, but i personally choose to open them in Bridge and then highlight the photos i need then load them into photoshop layers as i personally think its quicker.




After that is done you then need to go to >Window and choose >Animation and then this window at the bottom will appear with all the photos from the layers.

Then press the play button to check to see if there are any repeated photos, if there are then click on the photo that is repeated and then click the dustbin icon to get rid of it.




From there i then checked the timing of the animation, if the timing was slightly wrong, i changed it using the drop down menu underneath each of the pictures, i chose 0.3 seconds for each photo.




After that, the file then needed to be saved as a .GIF, this can be done by going to >File >Save for Web and Devices, this then brings up another window in which i chose the file type as a .GIF then lastly click save.