Inspired by the Noise Professor’s decision to make his animated GIF in Photoshop, I decided to play around with that tonight and ended up learning a good bit and with a much better process and product (fewer programs, higher quality).

I didn’t know you could do this all in just CS4.

Video to Images

Capture video frames as stills to layers – you can even select portions of the video right in the import window. You’ll now have all the frames as images in individual layers.

Animation Window

Open up the Animation Window¹

Eternal Looping

I set it to loop eternally. It’s right there in the bottom left hand portion of the animation window. If you forget you have the option to set this again when you do the final export/polishing.

Frame Speed

Shift click to select all the frames and you can change the animation speed all at once.

Animate the GIF

I saw this was impossible in a number of places and if you go to the normal Save/Save As location, it is. There is actually an option below that on the menu that is “Save for Web & Devices.” Somehow I never saw that. You’ll have Animated GIF as an option here.

Polish It Up