Question about gifs

[Skagens]

Hi there. This post is targeted to those who have experience in creating gifs. I'm at the moment trying to create something similar to this gif. Now, I have looked around how you go about making the flag transparent but all posts I see claim it's not possible for a gif to have transparency in it. In the gif I have linked to, the one I am trying to recreate, the flag is obviously transparent, meaning it is possible. I have all the material I need and I also have Photoshop, which should be sufficient enough to create what I want. Essentially what I want to know is how you would go about making the flag transparent so that if you have a picture behind the frames, it would show.

Thanks.

Edited December 8, 2017 by Skagens

[TheMastersSon]

GIF certainly does support transparency, but not on a separate channel. They're limited to 256 colors: 3 channels, R-G-B, with no separate transparency channel. However, any individual pixel or group of pixels in GIF images can also be set to "off" or no color (i.e. transparent). Note this is not the same as black (0,0,0), which is just another color instead of "no color".

 

What GIF can't do, because of its lack of a separate channel, is partial transparency (as in your example). As far as the GIF image knows or is concerned, neither the flag nor the person is transparent or even partially transparent. All pixels in GIF are either on or off. There is no "partially on" (again with regard to visibility of pixels, not their color), as is required for partial transparency. So the only way to accomplish the appearance of partial transparency is to first create it frame by frame in a graphics editor, and then build your GIF from these individual exported frames. It's a tedious process which is why you don't see a lot of GIFs with partial transparency, but better GIF editors (of which Photoshop has never been one) have options to do this for you automatically when GIF files are exported. It's also exponentially easier if you already have a short video clip of your desired scene. From there it can be simply and automatically exported to GIF by any decent video editor.

Edited December 11, 2017 by TheMastersSon

[Skagens]

I actually managed to solve it just the other day, the process of which you mentioned. The gif became around 60 frames so I had to select each individual frame and then change the opacity that way. It was a tedious (and to me, an unnecessarily long) process. I got the result I wanted but it just seems it should be a lot simpler than that.

Thanks for the reply.

[TheMastersSon]

As mentioned Photoshop is far from the best GIF editor in the world, in fact it's well toward the bottom of the list with regard to functionality and automatic processing of GIF files.

[soupdragon1234]

There used to be a program called Paintshop Pro I don't think its sold anymore though. It had a rather nice .gif animation editor you could select all frames at once and apply transparency in a single batch to all at once, or a selected number, or whatever you wanted. Photoshop as its name suggests was developed with photography in mind as a virtual darkroom.