by count zero

This guide will teach you how to animate images using Adobe Image Ready. This is NOT freeware, so you are on your own to *ahem* purchase it. This is useful for making startup and shutdown animations, animated sigs, or any animated image you will randomly feel a need to create.

First you need the images that you wish to animate, these need to be 176x 220, for the purpose of this guide we will use these images.

Save your images to a folder (I normally number my images in the order I want them to appear) these images were made using Photoshop. Now that we have the images we need to open Image Ready. Then from the ìFileî menu we need to select ìImport - Folder as framesî (see screen shot 1 below). Then navigate to the folder where the images are stored and click ok to import your files. This will give you a very basic animation like this:-

Screen shot1

The reason why the animation is so fast is that all the frames are set to 0 seconds delay so we need to alter this (see screenshot 2 below)

Screen shot2

I have set the first and last frames to 0.5 seconds and all the frames in between to 0.2 seconds. This gives the following result:-

Obviously you can play around with the frame timings until you are happy with the end result.

Once we are happy with the animation we need to save the image, do this by going to the file menu again and choosing ìsave optimised asî this will save the file as an animated GIF, see screenshot 3 below.

Thatís it you have just made an animated Gif that you can use as a screensaver/SU/SD animation.

That's all Folks!