Exporting GIF- 3 methods to go

How to export high quality gifs from Flash/After Effects/Photoshop/Animate adobe, how to quickly create gif from photos and more … Hope you will find your answer in this post

Gif- Graphics Interchange Format. Gif format is limited up to 256 colors for each frame. Therefor high quality photos and animations will look pretty bad, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

Gifs will be limited weight wise, either by time or size, so you can’t go wild with it. Animations shouldn’t be more than 500 frames. I recommend exporting the actual size you need and not assuming that if you will export a larger size and resize it to a smaller size it will look sharper (like in print), we try to get the lighter size file with the best quality we can get.

Tips:

• A gif will never look high quality when it has opacity! Gifs don’t have anti- alias and the borders will look really bad. Use BG!
• Long gifs can weigh more kb than MP4 so check that option too- recommended article about it

Method 1: Exporting PNG Sequence

Flash/After Effects doesn’t export gif files so the best thing to do is to export a PNG SEQUENCE. I recommend opening a new folder for it on your computer.

After you have a folder full of images it’s time to import it somewhere. Photoshop is great program to export high quality gifs so I’ll show you how: open the program → top bar select: file → open

In the pop up window choose the first image in your png sequence and mark the check box labeled image sequence that’s located in the bottom of the window.

Photoshop will open the sequence in a timeline (if you don’t see the timeline bar in the bottom go to top bar → window → timeline). Now all we need to do is go to the top bar →FILE →SAVE FOR WEB

And make sure all the details look like the example in the next screen shot:

That’s it (:

Method 2: Creating gif from recording user actions

LICEcap is a free program (available for of & mac) that allows you to record your actions on your computer into a gif file in a very simple way.

The program is actually an empty overlaid frame on your screen. You just position the frame on top of what you want to record, adjust the frame size as you wish and start recording. The outcome is a gif!

That is how I made the first gif on this post (:

Methods 3: Creating gifs from photos

If you have still images you want to run in a loop one after another you can easily do it online.

GIFmaker is an online platform where by “uploading images” you can get a preview of your images loop in the window located on the right, there you have control over speed, size and even the option to add background music to the sequence.

All that’s left to do then is to press “create now” and download the file to your computer.

There are several platforms that allow you to upload your gif to the web once you have it, Tumbler, GIPHY, Dribbble, gifs and more, they are all pre-registered platforms but after that you have your gif storage online and are able to share it on any social media platform you want.

Method 4: Yours

It’s hard to cover all the methods and beyond me to know how you do it best, so it’s a great idea to continue on sharing ways in the comments, the best methods I might add to the post so no one will miss it 😊 Thank you !

Originally published at www.pixelperfect.co.il on October 4, 2014.