Photoshop CS5: The Missing Manual

Animating a GIF

You may think that creating an animation is a complicated process, but it's really not. In Photoshop, all it means is that you're creating a slideshow that plays automatically. You can control which images the program uses, the amount of time it displays each one, whether it loops the slideshow (automatically starts over), and so on. This kind of control is really handy when you're making website ads. For example, if you're designing a 140-pixel x 140-pixel ad for your costume shop, you need to include a logo, a few costume samples, and a 10%-off coupon. Since you'll never fit all that into a tiny space, you can make an animated GIF that cycles through several images automatically. Here's how:

1. Create the images you want to string together, with each image on its very own layer within the same Photoshop document.

   Power Users' Clinic: Matching and Snatching Colors on the Web

   If you're designing an image destined for an existing web page, you may find yourself in a color-matching conundrum. If you need to match the color scheme (Color Theory: The Basics) or the colors in a company logo, you can do it by finding out the colors' hexadecimal values.

   Hex numbers, as they're affectionately called, are six-digit, alphanumeric programming codes for color values. The first two digits represent red, the next two represent green, and the last two represent blue (since your image appears only onscreen, RGB values are the only ones that matter). You can find a color's hex number in ...