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I’ve set up GIMP and I have
all my layers set up. I’m going to show you how to use the GIMP Animation Tool
to animate the layers. It is very simple.
Basically, from the menu, use Filters/Animation/Playback
The playback window hid behind our main window
so we are going to bring this out
and go ahead and click on the Start triangle.
It is a little fast. So, let’s slow it down.
Or, if you would like, you can step
one frame at a time, here’s frame #4
5 of six. Here is our first frame. Our second.
Third, fourth, fifth,
sixth. Now you can see how
the fourth one is out of place. Do you see how
it doesn’t fit at all. So, we are going to go over to the Layers panel
and drop/delete this fourth layer.
We aren’t deleting the file. Remember, these are copies from the files
Now I step through. First, second, third, and fourth.
Let’s try it again. Filters/Animation/Playback
Second, third, fourth, fifth. And there we go.
One of the things you can do is go into your background
Let’s hide these other layers for now.
We will add text to the first layer.
Go into Windows/Toolbox
We will select the Text tool.
Make sure you have that selected.
I’ll put what I want in there.
I’ll say “Flying Hawk”
Double click on the tool
to display the detailed panel for that tool.
We want bold so I’ll click on the Bold
I have to highlight my text.
Go to Bold. Ahh, I think I have a mispelled word here.
I’ll highlight my text and enlarge the font.
I’ll center the words.
I can also change the color.
And do various other things.
I’m going to click on the tab for Layers (or hit CTRL L)
and behind each of these I can set the
the time. Let me open up the Layer panel a little bit.
I can set the time for how long I want the image to remain.
If I want my background to be
two seconds, then I would say 2000 milliseconds.
And make sure you hit TAB to make the setting stick.
I want my text to be in my background, so what I’m going to do
is right-mouse click on the text layer
and I’m going to select “Merge Down”. There,
now the background and text layers are together.
The hawk1 layer I will have go to one second.
Oop. See I didn’t hit TAB...
TAB. And the hawk2 layer
I’m going to have for a half a second (500ms)
The hawk3 layer I’m going to change
back to a second and a half.
And the last layer I’m going to set for three seconds.
Don’t forget to save. CTRL s
I’ll use Filter/Animation/Playback
Go find the window.
Step through. There’s “Flying Hawk”
Then I’ll run my animation.
In the playback mode
it keeps repeating until you stop it
but we will change that when we export the file as a GIF.
The next thing you want to do is optimize the frames
If there are any pixels that repeat from picture to picture, then GIMP will
optimize that. I’ll use Filters/Animation/Optimize (for GIF)
You can see in the Layers Panel that it has combined the different layers
with repeating pixels that were the same throughout.
There is no sense handling pixels over and over again.
We want to get that GIF as tiny and small as we can.
Make sure you save the file!
CTRL s - Save.
The last thing we want to do is export
the file as a GIF. From the menu: File/Export
Change the file extension to GIF.
In the dialog box that comes up
we can select “As animation” Turn off the “Loop forever” option.
because you don’t want to be distracting people
and having their eyes keep jumping back to the animated GIF.
So, just go through it once. Leave everything else the same
and if you want you can have all the frames that haven’t been designated set to one second (1000 ms)
and then click on “Export”
If we go in and look at that file
Here is our animatedHawk.gif
You can see that on the Mac the preview keeps repeating over and over.
But, if we open it up in
a browser such as Google Chrome.
You can see that it is going to go through one time.
If we had this on your web page it would catch the interest of the user
right away, but it wouldn’t distract them as they looked at other parts of the page
So, there is how you make an animated GIF using GIMP.