Peekaboo

So, I was just having too much fun with taking pictures of my baby girl. Here is a cute animated GIF.

Stefanie asked me how I did this. I have Photoshop CS3 because I make product images for our business. At one point, however, I used to use Paint Shop Pro - which at $90 is a lot more affordable and does a lot of things that Photoshop does. You could make an animated GIF with that program too.

If your familiar with Photoshop, here is how to do it in Photoshop:

WARNING: FOR THE PHOTOSHOP SAVVY

Open up an image. You make your background image into a layer by right clicking on it in the layer's pallet, and choosing Layer From Background. Then add another layer. You can do this by selecting Layer > New > Layer, or by clicking the add a new layer button on the lower portion of your layer's pallet. Open the second image that you want to add to your animated GIF. Select all (CTRL-A) and copy (CTRL-C). Then, click on your second layer in your layers pallet of your original file. Paste (CTRL-V) your copied image into the second layer of your original file.

Now, go to your Window menu and click on Animation. An animation strip will open (if you have CS3, earlier versions have more steps). There is one animation open in the animation strip. For a two frame animation, click on the new layer button of the animation strip to add another frame. Now click on the first animation frame. Go to your layers pallet and unclick all layers except the layer that you want to show up in the first frame.  That will be the image in the first frame. Click on the second frame. Go to your layers pallet and choose the second frame image by unclicking all but the image you want in your second frame. If you look at your animation strip - you will see options for how long the frame should last and also whether it should run once or forever.  Save the file as a gif.

A Good Tutorial

Anyhow, I know that probably sounds really confusing if you don't use Photoshop much, but it's really pretty easy. There are lots of tutorials on the internet that teach you how to do this both for Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Here is a good animated gif tutorial for Photoshop:

Digital Scrapbook Place's PS Animated Gif