Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual

Creating Animated GIFs

With Elements, it's simple 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 creates a similar series of frames 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 animated GIF, you make a new layer for each frame. Save For Web creates the actual animation, which you can preview in a Web browser.

Tip

It's a shame that you can't easily animate a JPEG the way you can a GIF. Most elaborate Web animations involving photographs are done with Flash, which is another program altogether. You can learn a little more about Flash on Online Galleries. However, Elements offers another option if you want to make a standalone animation as opposed to an animated graphic for a Web page. Check out flipbooks on Flipbooks. You can build cartoon-like Windows Media format animations using flipbooks.

Probably the best way to learn how to create an animated GIF is to make one. Here's a little tutorial on making twinkling stars.

Before you start, set your background color to black and your foreground color to some shade of yellow. (See Choosing the Color You Want if you need help setting your foreground and background colors.)

1. Create a new document.

   Press Ctrl+N. Set the size to 200 ...