Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Creating Animated GIFs

Elements makes it easy to create animated GIFs, those little animated illustrations that make Web pages look annoyingly jumbled or delightfully active, depending on your tastes. If you've ever seen a strip of movie film or the cells for a cartoon, Elements does something similar with these specialized GIFs.

Animated GIFs are made in layers. (If you download an animated GIF and open it up in Elements, it appears as a multi-layered image.) When you create an animated GIF, you make a new layer for each frame. Save for Web creates the actual animation, which you can preview in a Web browser.

Note

It's a shame that you can't easily animate a JPEG the way you can a GIF. Most elaborate Web animations involving photographs are done with Flash, which is another program altogether.

Probably the best way to learn how to create an animated GIF is to make one. Here's a little tutorial on making twinkling stars.

Before you start, set your background color to black and your foreground color to some shade of yellow. (See page 174 if you need help setting your foreground/ background colors.)

1. Create a new document.

   Press Ctrl+N (⌘-N). Set the size to 200 pixels by 200 pixels, choose RGB for the Color mode, and choose Background Color for your Background Contents.

2. Activate the Custom Shape Tool.

   From the Shapes palette (in the Options bar), click the triangle inside the blue circle and then select Nature. Choose the Sun 2 shape, which is in the top row, in the second box from the ...