Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Creating Animated GIFs

With Elements, it's easy to create animated GIFs, those little 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 cels for a cartoon, Elements creates a similar series of frames with these specialized GIFs.

Animated GIFs are made up of layers. (If you download an animated GIF and open it in Elements, it appears as a multilayered 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. (You can learn a little more about Flash on Online Albums; if you want the full story, pick up a copy of Flash CS4: The Missing Manual.) But Elements offers another option if you want to make a stand-alone animation as opposed to an animated graphic for a web page: flipbooks (Flipbooks), cartoon-like Windows Media format animations.

The best way to learn how to create an animated GIF is to make one. Here's how to make twinkling stars:

1. Set your Background color to black and your Foreground color to some shade of yellow.

   See Choosing Colors if you need help setting your Foreground and Background colors.

2. Create a new document.

   Press Ctrl+N. Set the size to 200 pixels X 200 pixels, choose RGB for ...