practicing animated gifs

I've been meaning to learn more desktop publishing skills. It helps a lot in breaking work monotony (spreadsheets + corporate communications + liquidations) and hopefully builds the ambidexterity of my brain! Check these right/left brain ads out from Jeanie's blog to be inspired.

I read some articles earlier this year about free licensed Adobe CS2 software. I was able to secure legitimate copies of Creative Suite 2 versions Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for use at work. Yippie! My dream is to own (and use) a complete extended version, as well as be a certified Adobe expert from PCCI.

Crop it then pop it!

So in this day and age of  information overload and inexpensive (albeit wonky) internet connection, there's no reason not to be good in at least one thing. Youtube and apps provide so many crowd-sourced DIYs and lessons. So I tried learning to create the animated .gif (Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format) using snapshots of my nephew Noah. I sorted all the photos into a folder, opened them up in Photoshop CS2, made some adjustments and the cropped them so that the sizes of the images were uniform.Then, I opened up the animation panel and placed all the images in file, with each image having its own layer. 

Then select each image to correspond to its sequence in the animated gif. You can set the amount of time the image appears before it moves on to the next one.  Choose Save for Web, then choose .gif as your file format. Once saved, open the .gif in a browser to see the final product.  Good luck!