There are several programs that you can use to create animated gifs. These programs differ in their interface and some bells and whistles, but each of them does one thing well – creating animated gifs.
One of my main areas of work is designing and creating animated gif banners. I have found this a very rewarding and challenging work. In the course of having created thousands (yes!) of animated gif banners, I have come across several animated gif programs and I list them here for you.
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Animation Shop – Jasc
My favorite program is Jasc Animation Shop and I got it free along with PaintShop Pro, which is my favorite graphics editor. I found Animation Shop very easy to use and quite powerful. Furthermore, I can create images in PaintShop Pro and import them in Animation Shop in the PSP native file format to create animated gifs. Animation Shop comes with several built in animation effects details of which can be found in Animation Shop Special Effects.
You can get Animation Shop at the Corel site – www.corel.com.
Gif Construction Set
The Gif Construction Set was the first animated gif program I had used. It still is a very impressive program and according to the Mindworkshop web site, Gif Construction Set offers the following:
- Build instant animations with Animation Wizard.
- Reduce the size of your GIF files with Supercompressor.
- Build special-effect text banners with the Banner generator.
- Create sophisticated animated transitions between still images.
- Rotate, crop, colour-adjust and resize all or part of an animation sequence.
- Implement transparency in still and animated GIF files.
- Convert GIF files to AVI and MOV – animate your PowerPoint presentations.
- Create rotating two-dimensional animated graphics.
- Protect your graphics with Protection Matrix.
- Manage the controls of multiple images with breathtaking ease.
- Generate animated GIF files by remote control with integrated scripting.
- Generate text with soft shadows.
- Reverse the order of the images in a GIF file.
- Export animated GIF files to MNG.
- Export animated GIF files to SWF (Macromedia Flash®).
- Get up to speed quickly with extensive documentation and tutorials.
GifBuilder for Mac systems
Though I have never used this program to create animated gifs, one of my friend works on Mac and uses the GifBuilder quite frequently. You can find more information on it at the mac.org web site.
The three animated gif creation programs (above) are just the tip of the iceberg. There are tons of other software available some of which are listed on software to create animated Gifs.
