How to make a GIF from a video in Photoshop

How to make a GIF from a video in Photoshop

Animated GIFs continue to be among the most widespread file formats from the online world. You can find them on almost any social media website or popular forum. As time passed by, low-quality noise-filled GIFs were slowly replaced by better-quality animations. You can create GIFs from various types of image and video files, we've already mentioned how to perform the transformation for WMV files with one of the available freeware tools. The quality of the resulting files depends on the Windows tool you choose to use for processing. Even though there are dozens of utilities that help you convert videos to the GIF format, they don't always generate quality output files.

Adobe Photoshop, one of the most popular image editors at the moment, provides you with the ability to turn videos into high-quality GIFs. Known for the quality output files it can generate as well as its numerous amount of useful features, Photoshop has dethroned plenty of image editors over the years.  Even though it might be a bit expensive, it's definitely a must-have tool for people who work in the graphic design field.

In this article, I will show you how you can use Adobe Photoshop to make animated GIFs from videos. The guide addresses to people working with Photoshop CS5 and above. Here's what you need to do:

Step 1

Launch the utility on your PC. Head to File -> Import -> Video Frames to Layers and select the video clip you wish to load. The image editor supports a lot of video formats, like MP4, MOV, FLV, AVI, and many others. For example, you can use the utility to convert an MP4 file to the GIF format.

Importing Video In Adobe Photoshop

Step 2

Сhoose the preferred amount of frames you want to be imported from the video. The program lets you import up to 500 frames per session.

Configuring Import Settings In Photoshop

Step 3

The selected frames will then be loaded in the utility as layers. You remove or add frames from the Timeline panel, apply Photoshop effects if needed, etc.

Step 4

Once you finish editing the project, go to File -> Export -> Save for Web. Select GIF as output format, configure the settings according to your needs, and click the "Save" button.

Exporting GIF In Photoshop

Conclusion

Clearly, it's very simple to create GIF animations from videos in Adobe Photoshop. But as you probably know, the aforementioned image editor is quite pricey. There are dozens of other Windows tools that are less expensive or even free and enable you to generate GIFs from videos, but the output quality often leaves much to be desired. So, which image editor would you choose for making GIFs from videos? Let us know in the comments section below.

Alternative downloads

• Adobe Photoshop CC $31.49 windows Adobe Photoshop is a professional-quality photo editing tool... Download
• GIMP free windows Free versatile graphics manipulation package. Download
• Video to GIF $29.90 windows This is a simple program for converting videos to animated GIF images. Download