Gif Making Tips & Tricks
Some tip and tricks for making gifs.
Contents
Giphy Tools
GIPHY Gif Maker
In GIPHY's gif maker you can add text, effects, and "stickers" on top of a still image, video or other gif.
You'll find the Gif Maker at https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker or by clicking "Create" on GIPHY's homepage.
Other GIPHY Apps
GIPHY Cam is a phone app for making gifs!
GIPHY Capture is a screen capturing tool, it's useful for capturing parts of videos.
Animation
Piskel
Piskel is a webapp for making video game sprites, but it can totally handle gif-sized images and it really great for making simple hand-drawn animations.
Advanced
GIMP/Photoshop
Both GIMP (an open source image editor) and Photoshop have options to export your layers as a gif. This can be pretty clunky, but is an option for a gif with very few frames.
Video Editing Software
When it comes right down to it, a gif is mostly a short repeatable video. If you know how to use any video editing software you can turn that into a gif!
gifsicle
"Gifsicle is a command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations."
Gifsicle can be useful for resizing gifs that have too large a file size: gifsicle big.gif --colors 256 --resize-width 200 > small.gif
Download it here: https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/
ImageMagick
ImageMagick is a very powerful image editing library. It's another command line app used in a terminal and has a steep learning curve.
There is one simple commands that can get you started: convert *.png out.gif This take all the png files in your directory and makes them each a frame of an animated gif.
Download it here: https://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php
Sharing Gifs
Sometimes sharing gifs can be hard if a site doesn't play well with them. Use GIPHY for this! They have ways to share and export for a bunch of platforms.
Combos!!
Some of the power of these tools come from combining them in fun ways:
- Import a gif from GIPHY into piskel, draw on top of it.
- Export gif from Piskel in GIPHY, to add text and effects!
- Create an image in photoshop or GIMP, import it Piskel and edit.
- Export gif from GIPHY editor, and put it right back into the GIF maker to add more text.
