Editing Gif Making Tips & Tricks

[[File:MACC_animated.gif|thumb|[https://giphy.com/channel/macc_nyc Check out our giphy channel!]]]
== Giphy Tools ==
=== GIPHY Gif Maker ===
In GIPHY's gif maker you can add text, effects, and "stickers" on top of a still image, video or other gif.
You'll find the Gif Maker at https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker or by clicking "Create" on GIPHY's homepage.
=== Other GIPHY Apps ===
[https://giphy.com/apps/giphycam GIPHY Cam] is a phone app for making gifs!
[https://giphy.com/apps/giphycapture GIPHY Capture] is a screen capturing tool, it's useful for capturing parts of videos.
== Animation ==
=== Piskel ===
Piskel is a webapp for making video game sprites, but it can totally handle gif-sized images and it really great for making simple hand-drawn animations.
https://www.piskelapp.com/
== Advanced ==
=== GIMP/Photoshop ===
Both GIMP (an open source image editor) and Photoshop have options to export your layers as a gif. This can be pretty clunky, but is an option for a gif with very few frames.
=== Video Editing Software ===
When it comes right down to it, a gif is mostly a short repeatable video. If you know how to use any video editing software you can turn that into a gif!
=== gifsicle ===
"Gifsicle is a command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations."
Gifsicle can be useful for resizing gifs that have too large a file size: <code>gifsicle big.gif --colors 256 --resize-width 200 > small.gif</code>
Download it here: https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/
=== ImageMagick ===
ImageMagick is a very powerful image editing library. It's another command line app used in a terminal and has a steep learning curve.
There is one simple commands that can get you started: <code>convert *.png out.gif</code> This take all the png files in your directory and makes them each a frame of an animated gif.
Download it here: https://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php
== Sharing Gifs ==
Sometimes sharing gifs can be hard if a site doesn't play well with them. Use GIPHY for this! They have ways to share and export for a bunch of platforms.
== Combos!! ==
Some of the power of these tools come from combining them in fun ways:
* Import a gif from GIPHY into piskel, draw on top of it.
* Export gif from Piskel in GIPHY, to add text and effects!
* Create an image in photoshop or GIMP, import it Piskel and edit.
* Export gif from GIPHY editor, and put it right back into the GIF maker to add more text.
== Workshop Guide ==
This page was originally set up for our gif-making workshop, check out the [[:File:GifMakingWorkshopGuide.pdf|tutorial from the workshop]] for some step by step help getting started.
[[Category:Resources]]