My Sony VAIO laptop came pre-loaded with Photoshop Elements 2.0, along with a few other multimedia-related software. (That should give you an idea how old it is now!) Unfortunately, no manuals came along with the pre-installed software. So I’ve been using Photoshop Elements mainly by following my intuition because there aren’t many how-to’s on Photoshop Elements on the web (most people are using the full Photoshop version) and I don’t particularly enjoy plodding through Photoshop Elements’ built-in help file.
To make a long story short, it’s only a few days ago that I managed to discover how to make animated gif files with photos in my laptop using Photoshop Elements. It’s so easy, I wish I’ve discovered it sooner.
Step 1: Pick out the photos that you want to animate.
I chose a series of four photos showing Twin2 playing with the poolside frog fountain in Angsana Bintan Resorts & Spa.
Step 2: Resize the photos for the web. Most digital cameras these days come in 5-megapixels and above, so the original pics normally take up too much memory for Photoshop Elements to animate. In my case, I reduced the pics to 20%.
Step 3: Let the first photo in the series be the background. Create new layers for each succeeding photo. In my case, I added 3 more layers.
Step 4: Click on ‘Save For Web’, change file type to GIF (in my case, GIF 128 dithered), click on animate, click on loop and set the interval between pics (0.5 seconds for me).
Step 5: Preview the file in your web browser, then save.
And voila! You have an animated gif file from a series of photographs. (Click on the pic to see the resulting animated gif file, if you have a slow internet connection).
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