How to Make an Animated GIF in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will learn How to Make an Animated GIF in Photoshop CC.

For this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at the timeline feature of Photoshop.

First let’s understand what GIFs are: a frame-by-frame animation, unlike what you see in After Effects which is more of a temporal animation that’ll generate frames between different keyframes.

The way Photoshop deals with GIF animation is by enabling or disabling layer visibility.

We’ll create three duplicates of our layer and give them a different hue/saturation. This can be any other setting such as transform. It also can be a completely different layer such a brush drawing or even a different photo layer.

Now, go to Windows - Timeline. Click on the arrow and choose Create Frame Animation. Click it.

In the bottom, you’ll see one frame. Let’s only leave the first layer enabled for this frame. Next, click the plus icon and enable the 2nd layer here disabling everything else. Create the dirt frame and do the same. You can always preview your progress by clicking the Play button.

That’s it. A very straightforward way to create GIF animations. You can always dive into it even further with custom commands, tweening of frames, etc. however we do feel like those are a little more advanced techniques that require getting a good hang of GIF document creation all together.

❓💬 How often do you stumble upon GIFs in your daily life? Please let us know in the comments.

#HowTech #Photoshop
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Venitas]

For those who are looking to Export the GIF:
1. Go to the Top Left corner of the window and select File
2. Go down to Export and select Save for Web (Legacy)
3. Near the top right underneath the Preset dropdown box, ensure the dropdown says GIF, then save to your desired location
Hope this helps! :D

[TreeTube]

Wish you would have covered export/saving options. Otherwise it was pretty useful, thanks.

[elbasnight]

The window doesn't automatically populate when I choose create frame animation. So confused.

[dylannadeau]

How do you slow it down, right now its way to fast