Editing an animated GIF help

[jujubee]

So I went looking for a way to colorize an animated .gif the other day and noticed that CS4 no longer has ImageReady.

So I was stuck trying to figure out a way to overlay a color to it.

Imageready was so easy to use - simple yet perfect and now they destroyed it. Anyone have any 'simple' suggestions? I tried playing with Fireworks but my head imploded.

I feel like an idiot for writing this, but it's not something I do very often anymore...

[percydaman]

pretty sure photoshop has animation capabilities now. Ive just never used em.

[jujubee]

lol. I tried that. I went to import the gif and it spat out an 'error' message stating that it could only import one frame from an animation.

However, it can put them out.

[RErender]

Did you try imageready?

[xte]

in the adobe suite, fireworks is the way to go now. imageready was discontinued, and fireworks is way better. if you don't like fireworks, I believe gimp has good animated gif capabilities.

but really you should try to get a bit into fireworks, it is a nice program.

[rmejia]

It's a bit tricky but possible, this links has some screenshots with the steps:
http://www.stevennet.cc/magazine/?p=444

The "import - video frames to layers options", I think is only in the Photoshop CS4 32 bit version, not the 64. When importing in the list of file formats gif does not appear, if you type in "*.gif" then the gifs will show up.

[xte]

It's a bit tricky but possible, this links has some screenshots with the steps:
http://www.stevennet.cc/magazine/?p=444

The "import - video frames to layers options", I think is only in the Photoshop CS4 32 bit version, not the 64. When importing in the list of file formats gif does not appear, if you type in "*.gif" then the gifs will show up.

nice!

good to know. To save, use the "Save for Web & Devices..." functionality.

strange the 64 bits version doesn't support the import option.

thanks for the tip.


edit: the import doesn't support transparency... :/

[rmejia]

yeah, unfortunately no transparency

If you have Fireworks, that works and has transparency

[jujubee]

Thanks for the article - I came across it last night then went to go find it and it wasn't there in my menus lol.

I miss the simplicity of ImageReady. In a lot of ways it operated just like PS and it never felt like I had to learn a new program. Playing around with Fireworks - I think Adobe never completely 'cleaned' out the work from the Macromedia people. Just one more program I don't have much time to mess around with. The interface is unfamiliar - a simple layers color overlay? Where the hell did that go...

[jujubee]

I'm sorry but I just started messing around with it again and it reaffirmed my original belief - that thing is poo.

[rmejia]

I'm sorry but I just started messing around with it again and it reaffirmed my original belief - that thing is poo.

In theory Fireworks sounds cool, handling both raster and vector graphics, possibly eliminating the need for 2 different programs (photoshop & illustrator) but it feels like a "lite" version of those 2 programs. Also it does things differently, so one has to relearn how to do things the Fireworks way. Maybe a thread can be started in the Adobe forums to bring transparency and an easier .gif import to Photoshop.