Animated GIFs and Photoshop

Sharky

Sharky

New Member
This may be asking too much, but if someone could explain to me in general terms the basic steps for downloading an animated GIF and resizing it in Photoshop, if I get pointed in the right direction I'm in like Flynn.

Here's the deal: I understand that an animated file is in layers, so if you try to manipulate it in PS, you end up with one frame only and the animation is lost. Right? OK. I have found an animated GIF that I want to resize to 125x125 pixels to use as an avatar. But when I do the Mac equivalent of a right-click-save-target-as, I can only save the GIF as one frame.

1) How do I capture the GIF to my disk as an animated file?

2) How do I resize it without losing the animation?


If another program will do this, I also have these programs on this computer:

QuarkXPress
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Streamline
Adobe PageMaker
Acrobat Distiller
Acrobat Reader
Acrobat InProduction
Adobe ImageReady
Freehand
InDesign
Tailor

Any advice or instruction will be muchly appreciated. Thanks!
 
You should be using ImageReady to work with the animated gifs. If you try to do it in PS it won't work well. Are you familiar with ImageReady?
 
Squiggy said:
You should be using ImageReady to work with the animated gifs. If you try to do it in PS it won't work well. Are you familiar with ImageReady?
Click to expand...

Aha - ImageReady . . .

I'll give her a go, Squiggy! Thanks for the tip. I'll post what happens. :lloyd:
 
If you're familiar with PS, ImageReady won't be too hard to figure out. If you have a problem, I'll be here for a little while longer. ;)
 
OK - I resized the image in ImageReady, and verified that the animation still works. It does. But when I try to save it, it saves it as a .psd file, and I can't save it as a .gif. If I export it into PS, I can save it as a .gif, but it will lose the animation. Aaaargh! See my current avatar? I look just like that right now.
 
Go under the file menu and select "save for web" ...It will open another window to save it from.
 
I just checked the menu. Its actually "save optimized". Another option is to preview in> IE or another browser and drag that image to your desktop.
 
Squiggy said:
I just checked the menu. Its actually "save optimized". Another option is to preview in> IE or another browser and drag that image to your desktop.
Click to expand...

OK. I saved for web in PS, and it saved as a .jpg, but it lost it's animation. I'll try "save optimized".
 
Don't bother taking it into PS. That will only work on one slice. If you still have a problem, post it here and let me know what size you want it.
 
OK. That worked, but the file is too big to use as an avatar. It is 43kb, but the avatars are limited to 20kb. Sigh.
 
BTW Sharky I had this if you need a back up av.

And all you need do tothat one is open it in ImageReady again and change the mode to indexed color. That should knock the size down enough.
 
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