How do you make an animated gif?

Answer 1

To make an animated gif, you first need a series of frames.

Frames are individual still images. You'll need to make several of these in which each frame is slightly different from the one before it depending on what will be animated at the end.

For example, you could have a cartoon character standing face-forward with hand in air in first images. The second image, everything would be the same except the hand would be moved slightly to the right. The third, same as the second, but the hand even more to the right, and so on, until you get to like image 10 in which the hand would be moving toward the left in each image.

You can do this in Photoshop.

Use Photoshop's built-in animation palette. In the palette, there will be individual layers and frames for you to work with in building the animated image. Each frame will be each of the images as described above. The animation palette will also give you tools to set the animation in a loop as well as the timing between frames.

So, once you have all the images together, you will just need to set the palette to loop the animation (if you wish) and lay the next image over top the image before it to make the image appear to be animated and save it as a gif file.