Help me animate like it's 1999

October 25, 2010 12:34 PM

I'm looking for a program that will let me quickly edit animated gifs. I'm looking to do things like combine two gifs together, applying color changes dynamically across all frames (like hue shifts and stuff), basic tweening of objects maybe... I've been using Photoshop and Imageready and haven't been impressed.

I would be willing to pay up to 50 dollars for a really good program.


This has some interesting stuff but 2004 = lots of dead links.

posted by codacorolla to media & arts (6 answers total)

Graphic Converter has always done right by me.
posted by unixrat at 12:38 PM on October 25, 2010

Oh, I should've mentioned, I'm on a PC. So no Mac software, unfortunately.
posted by codacorolla at 12:40 PM on October 25, 2010

I've been using GIF Movie Gear since the last millennium. Doesn't do tweens, but it has a lots of control options and works a treat.
posted by dirtdirt at 12:41 PM on October 25, 2010

That looks pretty promising dirtdirt. Does anyone have any experience using GIMP? I don't like it much as a Photoshop substitute, but I've heard it's good for gif animation.
posted by codacorolla at 2:20 PM on October 25, 2010

I have used Gimp for gifs. Indeed, I have used it in the last week. There is an animation plugin for GIMP that's very powerful - it's not the most user friendly thing in the world, and it interacts with files in a particular way that it never bothers to inform you is necessary (individual frames are saved in a folder as separate images with a particular naming convention - if you don't do this, the thign just shits itself and won't work). But this all said, it does exactly what you're asking about, and it's free.

If that's too comfortable, you can do simple gifs without the animation plug in (frames are individual layers), but each frame/layer has to be edited itself.

here is a tutorial for the plugin

and here is a tutorial that mainly doesn't use the plug-in

Note, the second tutorial is far easier to understand and better written. Good luck!
posted by smoke at 3:22 PM on October 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Adobe (née Macromedia) Fireworks does a great job with animated GIFs, and has for many revisions back.
posted by OneMonkeysUncle at 6:05 PM on October 25, 2010