User blog:Vegetalix/How to : Create an animated gif

How to create your own animated gif ?
In this tutorial I'll explain how I made this thumbnail :



What do I need ?
- An artwork to work on.

- A software to edit this artwork. I personally use Paint.Net but Photoshop or even Gimp will do the job as good as it if not better.

- An internet connection.

Step 1 : Get your artworks
Look for a decent artwork to work on. Never forget to give credits to the original creator if you're not the creator.

For my thumbnail, here's what I used :

Step 2 : Edit your artworks to fit your needs
Use your picture editor software to edit your artworks.

Here are the results for mine :



Step 3 : Create the gif's frames
Here's the longest step of the creation, it's not that hard but it can take quite a long time.

I'd recommend you to make from 20 to 29 frames, it means 20-29 single .png images, or .jpg if you don't need the transparency effect. You can name the frames by their position in the gif 1.png, 2.png, etc ...

Don't forget that from one frame to another the transition has to be smooth, to illustrate this, here's how I made the glowing eyes effect :



Then copy the images backwards to make 6 frames loop it smoothly.

Here's how the gif will look like with 20 frames :



Step 4 : Create the final gif
I think there are many ways to put all the frames together. The simplest way to do it is probably websites like http://gifmaker.me/ which will allow you to upload every single frame to automatically mount them together. The quality isn't the best though.

Here's what the previous example looks like with only the glowing red eyes effect on 6 frames, 200 milliseconds/frame and looped (repeat time = 0) :



Finally, here's the finished gif with the lightnings added over the glowing red eyes effect (200ms/frame, looped) :



Thanks
Thanks for reading this tutorial. I hope it will be useful to some of you.

Feel free to share about any specifications about the different softwares/ technics you can use through this tutorial.