Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

434 Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

Creating Animated

GIFs

• Use Document Color Profile. If you kept the ICC profile (page 181), this set-

ting tries to match how your image will look as a result of that.

These are all only rough approximations. You need only take a stroll down the

monitor aisle at your local electronics chain to see what a wacky bunch of color

variations are possible. You really can’t control how other people are going to see

your image unless you go to their homes and adjust their monitors for them.

NOTE Changing any of these color options affects only the way the image displays on your

monitor; it doesn’t change anything in the image itself.

Creating Animated GIFs

Elements makes it easy to create animated GIFs, those little animated 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 does something similar with these specialized GIFs.

Animated GIFs are made in layers. (If you download an animated GIF and open it

up in Elements, it appears as a multi-layered image.) When you create an ani-

mated 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 ...