GIF's

[Dr. Tentakelliebe]

This tread will hopefully be about GIF's how to make, manage, move them anything you want to know.

I invite everyone who knows anything about them to come and post there knowledge and if you have a question just ask. I know i will.

 

[Dr. Tentakelliebe]

ok so this was a complete failure

 

[VSE]

ok, I'll take the bait

How, given that I have the artistic ability of a housebrick, do I go about making a simple animated gif given that I am rapidly approaching 100 posts?

 

[Bobmi357]

ok, I'll take the bait

How, given that I have the artistic ability of a housebrick, do I go about making a simple animated gif given that I am rapidly approaching 100 posts?

Animation is created by making successive frames of an image. Each frame is slightly altered from the previous frame. You need special software to make animations, and a fairly decent touch. Some programs come with a feature called "Tweening", this allows you to take two totally different images, and the software will create composites of the two images, so in effect, one image morphs into another image.

Doing it the old fashioned way, by hand, drawing each frame and putting it all together is time consuming and mind dulling, but it could be done. You'd still need a program to put it all together.

BTW: Since this is a GIF thread, here's a helpful tip for people. GIFs work best for artwork, use the JPEG format for photos. Avoid using the BMP format, its compression sucks bigtime and not all browsers have the capability of displaying BMP formats. I know my netscape won't show them.

 

[N8Dreams]

Bobmi,

know any freeware for animated gifs?

 

[Bobmi357]

Bobmi,

know any freeware for animated gifs?

I'm afraid I don't know of any freeware programs. When I need to build an animation, I either build it in photoshop or I create the animation in flash (which isn't a gif animation at all)

As far as cheap gif animators go, I did do a search for one and came up with this link;

http://www.easyimagetools.com/products/effectbox/index.htm

The program costs 25 bucks I think, but I can really say how good it is. Sorry.

 

[Weird Harold]

Bobmi,

know any freeware for animated gifs?

There is, or was, a site named GIFWorks that allowed you to create animations online. I believe there was also a free downloadable version as well.

I've never used it, and have been told there are far better programs available for creating animatied GIFs.

It's NOT freeware, but www.jasc.com has trial versions of PaintShop Pro and Animation Shop available. The two programs work together to create animations. Registration/purchase is very reasonable for the programs' capabilities at around $125 (as opposed to the extortionate cost of PhotoDeluxe or Photoshop from Adobe Software.

 

[Weird Harold]

Some GIF Basics

I invite everyone who knows anything about them to come and post there knowledge and if you have a question just ask. I know i will.

GIF = Compuserve Graghics Interchange Format and is one of the oldest surviving graphics formats. It has been updated and modified to allow better compression algoritms and animation, but is still essentially the same "lowest comon denominator" form of exchanging graphics between platforms.

GIF format images are limited to a pallete of 256 colors. This is why they're good for artwork, but generally bad for photos.

If you want an animated avatar, it pretty much has to be in GIF format, because the GIF specifications are the only image format that formally defines an animation (or slideshow) protocol.

Almost any image editing software can display and edit non-animated GIF images, but editing animated GIFs requires animation software. Editing an animated GIF with normal image editing software will convert the image to a static GIF showing only the first frame of the animation.

Animated GIFs can always be viewed with your browser if you have nothing else that can display the animations.

 

[Soblue]

Here is the freeware I used to make an animated gif

http://www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/

It's a simple program that takes several gif files and turns them into one animated gif.

If that's what you are looking for, this does the trick.

 

[Dr. Tentakelliebe]

thanks it works well that is how i made this one

 

[N8Dreams]

Here is the freeware I used to make an animated gif

http://www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/

It's a simple program that takes several gif files and turns them into one animated gif.

If that's what you are looking for, this does the trick.

thanks, its working great

 

[Dr. Tentakelliebe]

bump