Unfortunately, because of the nature of how each frame is constructed, it’s not always possible to apply these edits non-destructively, but it is sometimes. Here’s a quick explanation of some of the more common Photoshop edits that you can apply to an animated GIF.

Step 3: Applying Your EditsĪpplying Photoshop concepts to an animated video can be a bit difficult to grasp at first, but you’ll get the hang of it. The Timeline panel also allows you to do some other important jobs, such as controlling the length of time each frame is displayed, quickly changing the order of your frames, and getting an animated preview of your file. Selecting a frame to edit within the Timeline panel allows you to automatically display it in the main document window without having to mess around with the layer visibility in the Layers panel. Just think of it like the progress bar that you see when watching a streaming video, except that instead of a simple colored line indicating your position in the video, you see a row of thumbnails displaying each frame instead. In essence, the Timeline is a horizontal, time-based layer stack that runs from left to right. If you’ve ever used a video editing app, the concept is probably quite familiar to you, but for those of you who aren’t veteran video editors, it’s still an easy idea to pick up. The GIF used in this tutorial is from by Luis Ricardo.

Editing a GIF that’s just a still image works exactly the same way as editing any other image, and doesn’t require any special instructions. Note: for this tutorial, I’m going to assume that you want to edit an animated GIF. If you’ve got a favorite GIF that you want to edit, Photoshop is a great tool for creating seamless edits (or utterly ridiculous ones, if that’s more your style). While GIFs are often used to display videos, they’re still technically an image format, not a video format, which means that Photoshop still has the ability to edit GIFs. Photoshop is one of the most powerful image editing tools ever created, and for a long, strange time in its development, Adobe was adding every single feature they could think of, from 3D model painting to video editing.Īfter a while, Photoshop became a bloated mess, and Adobe finally began to remove some of these additional features and split them off into their own dedicated editing apps. While it can technically be used as a still image format, the feature that enshrined the GIF in the hall of internet fame is its ability to display multiple frames within a single file, allowing it to become a quick way to share short video clips. Few internet phenomena have survived quite as long as the GIF.

Editing gifs in photoshop