How to Make an Animated GIF from a Video in Photoshop CS5

Have you ever seen those funny GIF animations from videos and wished you could make them too? Now you can make them easily! Just follow this guide to making them in Photoshop CS5.

1

Import the video.

To turn a video into an animated GIF, you'll need to turn each frame into a separate layer. This is really easy to do in CS5, as long as your video is in the MOV, .AVI, .MPG, .MPEG, or .MP4 format. Here's how:
- Click the File menu and select Import.
- Click Video Frames to Layers.
- Select the video and click Load.
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2

Choose which frames to use.

Check the appropriate selections under "Range To Import." To select only a few frames, check "Selected Range." This option will allow your GIF to be converted much faster. The size/layers will also be smaller so that you can easily edit the GIF. If you do this, move the slider in the video to your starting point, then hold shift and drag towards the ending point to ensure that a section has been highlighted.
- If you have a high frame rate video (over 60 frames per second) then check "Limit to Every [x] frames" and type a number in place of 'x'. This will select every xth frame which will make conversion faster and image size lower (and lower quality) by dividing frame rate by 'x'. You would want a frame rate of around 15-30.

3

Click "OK."

This converts the video into layers. You can now turn these layers into an animated GIF.
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4

Open the Animation panel.

The Animation panel allows you to work on individual frames in the animation.

5

Clean up your frames.

In the animation panel, trim any unnecessary frames until your animation looks how you want it. This is also the time to add any new frames. Remember that if the number of frames is low, the size will be smaller and the GIF will take less time to load when you post it on a website.
- Check the time of the animation as shown on the screenshot at the right. Bigger numbers means slower animations that run less smoothly.
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6

Turn on forever looping.

the bottom left on the animation frames and check "Forever." This will ensure you that the GIF will stay animated forever.

7

Crop the animation.

Select the "Rectangle marquee tool" on the upper left side of the toolbar, then select the section you want to focus on. Click the Image menu and choose Crop to crop out all other areas.
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8

Resize the animation.

To do this, click the Image menu, select Image Size, and choose the new dimensions. It's recommended that you pick out the right size as doing otherwise could make your GIF look odd. You generally want to choose half the dimensions of the original GIF.

9

Save the animation as a GIF.

Saving a file as a GIF is a little different than saving in other formats.
- Click the File menu and choose Save for Web & Devices.
- Change the setting to "GIF" to make sure it's animated.
- Click Preview to make sure everything looks right. If you want to change anything, you can always click Cancel to go back to Photoshop.
- The settings in the GIF menu apply compression. A lower file size will load faster in a browser but may look bad. GIF compresses by throwing away colors as you can see if you experiment with the settings.
- It's useful to choose 2 up on the upper tabs of the save for web dialog box. This allows a view of "before and after" and includes a preview with a file size.
- If everything looks fine, click Save. Fill in the file name and save it.
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