Gif Maker
Make an animated gif photo!
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Below you will read how to make an animated gif photo using a gif maker software.
You have certainely visited web sites with small animated gif graphics and buttons.
Do you know that you can also build animated gif photos yourself very easily?
You just need a few digital photos and a gif maker software.
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There are many of them around and I will tell you below which one I did retain for my personal use.
But first you need adequate photos.
Let's look into this.
Adequate photos
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Adequate photos means 2 or more photos that are identical except one detail that is different.
We will take the following photos as an example: a model car with opened and with closed bonnet.
Using a gif maker software, you will be able to built an animated gif image where the bonnet seems to open and close alternately.
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The important point is that the photos are really identical for all the parts that are not different on both photos.
Best is to take the photos with a tripod and to NOT move the object (neither the camera)
from its exact place between the moment you take the first photo and the second one (or the following ones).
Nevertheless, both photos may not overlap perfectly.
If there are slight differences between the sizes of the objects, the objects may need to be rescaled,
that means you may need to resize one photo by a factor of 99% for example.
This slight resizing can be done with most good photo editors.
Eventually read again our pages about
resizing.
However, if you did take much care not to move the object neither the camera,
rescaling should not be necessary.
Only a little shift may need to be compensated.
Good gif maker software will let you shift each frame of the animation individually by a few pixels left/right and up/down.
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You could also extract a few photos from a video sequence (avi or mpeg file),
save them as individual photo files and insert them as frames into the gif maker software.
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Gif maker software
Many gif maker programs are available.
I did try out a bunch of them.
And I did encounter many "not so nice" candidates.
Either overblown in size, producing unusable strange results or simply not so convenient to use.
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The gif maker software I did select for my personal use is
Easy Gif Animator
The Easy Gif Animator is a cheap gif maker,
convenient to use and has a good optimize tool to reduce the size of your animated GIF files.
Effect functions and text animation functions are included too.
An example of text animation added to our gif photo is just at the left.
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Moreover the Easy Gif Animator is the only one among the numerous ones I did try out,
that comes with a wizard to create animated banners for your web pages!
Adding frames
To make an animated gif with a gif maker,
you will add frames, look at the preview and save it when you are satisfied.
That's the short version.
Let's look deeper into the frame adding.
Your original photos are probably saved as jpeg files, that are photo files with 16 millions of colors (24 bit color depth).
Gif files, knowingly have only 256 colors (8 bit color depth).
With most gif makers, you CAN open jpeg files when you add a frame.
The transformatiom of a 16 millions of colors file to a 256 colors frame is done automatically by the gif maker.
But with most of them the results of the transformation will not please you, at least they did not please me!
Because the gif maker does reduce the 16 millions of colors to a palette of 256 colors,
using a method that may not always be the most adequate for your photo.
My advice is to reduce the color definition of your photo yourself before using a gif maker,
i.e. to convert your jpeg's to gif's and then to feed the gif maker with gif files, not with jpeg files.
Nevertheless, there is NO NEED to convert jpeg's to gif's separately ahead of using
Easy Gif Animator.
Just select Palette = optimized and Dithering mode = nearest color under the menu Tools/Options/Import,
before adding (importing) your frames.
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Reducing color depth
How do you reduce the color depth ahead when using other gif makers ?
Simply with any photo editor that is able to reduce the color depth of an image,
letting you choose among a few algorithms and settings, so you can obtain the best results.
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Converting a jpeg to a gif with a photo editor
1. Open the jpeg
2. Apply the reduction of color depth (16 000 000 to 256) or (24 bit depth to 8 bit depth)
You may/should have to choose a palette:
- standard palette
- browser palette
- adaptive palette
- median optimized palette
- octree optimized palette...
and a dithering method:
- none or nearest color
- error diffusion (Burkes, Floyd-Steinberg, ...)
Error diffusion will mostly produce a bigger file size, but the palette choice is less important.
Nearest color or no dithering with adaptive palette (median optimized or octree) is optically better and files should be smaller.
Nearest color or no dithering with standard palette or browser palette is not (seldom) recommended for photos.
3. Save as a gif file
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A few photo editors that are able to reduce the color depth of an image:
Zoner Photo Studio,
Paint Shop Pro,
Photoshop Elements,
Photophilia,
among others.
Remark: With Zoner Photo Studio, do not search the color depth reduction function,
just open a jpeg and save it as gif, the color depth reduction dialog will appear automatically while you save the gif!
