Do you need an animated gif for your twitter avatar or Google+ cover photo to make you look unique and creative?
How about using animated gifs as your website images, logo or banners, on your email signatures, or even on your android wallpaper?
There are many websites that can help you make animated gifs. But in this article I am going to show you how I made this top image for my Google + cover photo with Gimp. After all it is the best choice to be able to fully personalize your images for your social media profiles or websites.
And it is really not that hard to do.
By the way, Gimp is a free downloadable program for photo retouching and image composition. You can download Gimp here. It works much like Photoshop, only this one is free.
Steps to create an animated gif with Gimp:
- Open Gimp to create a new layer. I chose a white background because my website logo has a white background. The size is 470(width)x150. The width is the minimum requirement for Google + cover photo.
- Choose “File” , “Open as layer” to open my logo image.
Right click to choose “Layer”, “Scale Layer” to set this new layer as 286×85.
Use the “Eraser Tool” to erase the part I don’t need for the First image, only keep the words that I would like to show first.
Use “Move Tool” to drag this new layer to left, leave enough space for a profile photo to appear on the Google + page right hand.
3. Choose “Layer”, “New Layer” to see the pop up window for creating a new layer. Use the same size and choose the same white fill type, click “OK”.
Then repeat Step 2 to make the new layer look like this.
4. One important step here is to remove the white background of the second layer so that I can align the second image layer exactly on top of the first image. To carry out this, choose “Layer” , “Transparency”, ”Add Alpha Channel”, then choose “Fuzzy Selection Tool” to click on the white part of the image, after all the text part was selected, use “delete” key on your keyboard to remove the white background.
5. Do the same to the next few layers.
6. Create a new layer for text using Text tool, make sure the text all align to the left side of the background so that enough space is left open for Google + profile photo to appear on the right side.
7. Create a new layer to show the URL
Before saving the images as an animated gif, I need to define how much time each layer can show up on the screen.
6. Find layers under the “Layers” tab, right click each layer, choose “Edit Layer Attributes”, after each layer’s name I add from (1500ms) to (7000ms) for different layers. You can see from the image on top that some image stay longer than others.
If you don’t define how long each layer can be visible, each of them will be seen for a default time span which you can set later on.
7. To save these layers as an animated gif, choose “File” then “Export to”, choose a storage place in the computer, save this as an “gif” file, then click “Export”.
A pop up window shows like this:
Choose “As animation” and “loop forever”. You can see here the “1003″ is the default time span for each undefined layer.
Click “Export”, now the animated gif is saved and ready for use.
You can click the image above and check my Google + profile for the final result.
Are you interested in learning all different methods of making money online?
Collecting all the tips and techniques of making money online is what we do.
Save your own time and make full advantage of this Free Service by
Signing up for our latest tips and newsletters NOW.
Great web site. A lot of helpful information here. I’m sending it to some friends ans additionally sharing in delicious. And of course, thanks on your sweat!
[...] spam the receiver’s inbox with marketing emails, make sure you include appealing infographics and animations to intrigue the customer. In addition, offer the receiver a subscribe option, so that if he/she is [...]