Today I’m going to show you how to make an animated gif using Adobe Photoshop. I have text that says “Go Beavs”, over an image of campus, and what I’d like to have happen is for the Go Beavs to be spelled out over the image, looking like it’s being typed.
- Select the text layer, hold alt+click and drag the layer to copy it.
- Hide the first text layer and delete a letter from the new layer.
- Repeat until all letters are deleted. This is an easy way to make it look typed out. By doing it backwards like this we can design it the way we want beforehand.
- Open the Timeline window by going to Window>Timeline
- Click Create Frame Animation
- Select the options and click “Make Frames from Layers”
- To add the background image to all frames, select all layers and hide/unhide the image layer so that it is visible on all frames.
- Select all frames in the Timeline layer and change the delay time to .1 seconds (NOTE: what is previewed might not be what the GIF comes out to look like. Trial and error might be needed to see what speed you need.)
- To make the last frame hold for longer, select the frame and click the options button to select Copy Frame, and then Paste Frame…
- Select ‘after selection’ and click OK. Repeat until you have the length desired.
- Go to File>Export>Save for Web (Legacy)…
- Select the preset GIF 128 Dithered, and Save.
Thank you, and good luck!