Creating GIFs using Photoshop

https://www.carolinahannaeducation.com/how-to-make-a-gif-using-lightroom-and-photoshop/

The hardest part about creating a GIF was getting the file size down to 1 MB. Some messaging apps (like Google Voice) seem to have file size limits since I wasn’t able to send a full size GIF (22 MB! I know; too big). I tried looking for a web page that has the limits, but only found forums discussing it. It’s likely around 1 MB. I was able to send a GIF that was slightly larger than 1 MB, but was not able to send one that was 2 MB.

I’ve included the tips after each step in the process below. But there are two major ways you can reduce the size of the GIF:

  1. Aggressively get rid of frames (most effective). It turns out you can take out a bunch of frames and still have a smoothly looping GIF.
  2. When saving the GIF, adjust how images are compressed and how much compression is applied. Ranking options from most to least effective: Color bit space (8 or 16 bit seems to work well), dithering (88%), loss (1 seems to be most effective), compression algorithm.

Instructions

  1. File -> Scripts -> Load files into stack
    1. Try to limit the number of frames you use since the final GIF should be around 1 MB in size.
    2. If you only have frames that cover half of some movement, you can create a copy of your current frames and then reverse the copies so that the movement will happen in reverse and create a smooth transition back to the starting frame.
  2. Windows -> Timeline
  3. Create Frame Animation
  4. Once you see the first frame on the timeline, click the hamburger icon and select “Make frames from layers”
  5. Take out unnecessary frames to help minimize the size of the GIF. You are going to need to aggressively trim frames if you want to maintain the quality of the images.
  6. Select all frames in the timeline
  7. Change the duration of each frame, if desired
  8. Make sure it’s set to loop “Forever”
  9. Save: File -> Export -> Save for web (Legacy)
  10. During save, you can tweak how much compression is done to the GIF. Most to least effective strategies listed here:
    1. Adjust color bit space
    2. Adjust dithering
    3. Adjust loss
    4. Adjust compression algorithm