I have seen some wonderful animated photographs as GIFs and I want to make some myself, however most GIF creation software I have seen is touted as being 'small', 'simple' and 'free'. Great but these programs are not pwerful enough or do not have the tools required to animate a series of photographs.
Anybody got any ideas or suggestions about how to produce a simple endless loop of 20 to 50 photographs?
I like the small free ones better myself. But either way the process is the same. Process your images as you normally would and use the GIF tools to set the kind of dithering, transparency, speed and looping you want and save it out. Pretty simple. If you already have PS then sure go for that... But keep in mind PS doesn't allow bi-directional looping (ping-pong), nor offer useful controls over dynamic pallets and transparency like many of the free or share ware ones do.
Thanks for the responses, what I really want to find is some dedicated software for making cinemagraphs. Most Gif creation software is incapable of the quality I'm looking for and before I shell out to upgrade from PS CS4 I want to be sure that it will do it.
I think one of the limiting factors is the quality of the GIF format - a maximum of 256 colors. I would think it would be possible to do a cinemagraph in PNG, which might help, but I haven't found an example yet. This is probably due greatly to the fact that animated PNGs are still only supported in very few browsers (Firefox and Opera). Creating a video file might also be a possibility. The nice thing about GIFs though, is that they play almost universally and you can usually keep the file size fairly small.
Gif only support 256 colors 255 if transparency is needed. Photoshop has good support and can generate in between frames with two layers you can do something like this: Scaled down the drop shadow does not look this bad use link to see Scaled Down
