The Ultimate Guide to Edit Animated GIFs with Photoshop and Its Best Alternative
Last Updated on September 19, 2023 by Peter Wood
Animated GIFs are popular now on the Internet to share more content, but it’s not easy to make interesting GIFs by adjusting, enhancing, adding effects and stickers, etc. Don’t worry! You can learn how to use the professional image editor – Photoshop to edit the animated GIFs in this article. Here are detailed steps to add watermarks, apply effects, crop, and enhance the GIFs with Photoshop. If you are a beginner having difficulty in using Photoshop, here is also a powerful but easy-to-use Photoshop alternative to edit GIFs.
Part 1: How to Edit Animated GIFs with Photoshop
Although Adobe Photoshop is difficult for beginners, it’s a professional image editor with powerful editing features for you to make adjustments, add effects, and enhance your animated GIFs. Here are the detailed steps to unleash your creativity and use Photoshop to edit animated GIFs with interesting ideas.
Firstly, you should add your GIFs to Photoshop by clicking the File menu and choosing the Open option.
After uploading your animated GIFs, click the Window menu and tick the Timeline option. In this way, you can see all frames at the bottom.
You can also use Photoshop to make GIFs from videos and then edit them. Just click the File menu and the Import button. Then, click the Video Frames to Layers button and add your videos.
Now, you can learn different ways to edit GIFs in Photoshop by cropping, enhancing, adding watermarks, and applying effects.
1. How to Crop Animated GIFs in Photoshop
If your GIF size is larger than the requirement of social platforms, you need to crop it through Photoshop with the following methods:
Step 1: Choose any one frame from the timeline and click the Crop tool from the left bar. You can also press the C key to simply launch the tool.
Step 2: Then, you can use your mouse to drag the borderlines and crop the GIFs into the desired size and aspect ratio. If you want to keep the original square shape, you can drag the corners. In this way, you can also rotate the GIFs as you like.
2. How to Add Watermarks to GIFs via Photoshop
Adding stickers or texts as watermarks on GIFs is also a good way to edit animated GIFs in Photoshop and make interesting effects. Follow the steps now:
Add stickers or images as watermarks to GIFs
Step 1: First, you should click on the last frame from the timeline to ensure the added images are on top of all frames.
Step 2: Then, you can directly drag and drop the desired image into Photoshop and see it at the top in the Layer window. After you adjust the position and size of it, click the Tick icon to apply this watermark to all frames.
Add texts as watermarks to GIFs
Step 1: Click the Text tool or press the T button on your keyboard. Then, you can click on the desired position to add a text watermark. When there is a flashing cursor, directly type what you want to say.
Step 2: Just like adding images to GIFs, you can also move the text layer to the top. Then, you can edit the animated GIFs further by adjusting the font, size, color, and more.
Tips: You can also move the image or text layer to the desired part if you don’t want the watermark to show all the time.
3. How to Apply Effects to GIFs through Photoshop
It’s also a good idea to change your GIFs' whole style, color, and filter. Thus, you can use Photoshop to edit animated GIFs by applying those stunning effects. Follow the steps below:
Step 1: Double-click the desired layer from the right bar, and you can change the layer style in the popping-up window. Adjust the color, shadow, pattern, and more settings as you like.
Step 2: Here are also many preset effects and filters for you. Click the Filter menu and the Filter Gallery button. You can preview the effect and then click the OK button to apply it.
Step 3: Right-click the edited GIFs in Photoshop and click the Copy Layer Style button. Then, you can choose the left layers and apply the same effects to all of them.
4. How to Enhance Animated GIFs with Photoshop
When you export the edited GIFs from Photoshop, you can still enhance the quality and color of the GIFs. Here are some important values you should know.
Step 1: To export GIFs, click the File menu and the Save for Web button. You can change the color to 256 and the quality to 100% to enhance your GIFs.
Step 2: After all the adjustments, click the Save button and select the desired file folder to store.
Part 2: The Photoshop Alternative to Edit GIFs
Photoshop is indeed difficult for beginners, and here is WidsMob GIF for you to easily edit GIFs without Photoshop. It’s a professional GIF editor that supports trimming, cropping, resizing, changing the filters, adding watermarks, and exporting high-quality outputs. Better than Photoshop, it can also edit the frame rate to make smooth GIFs.
1. Best Photoshop alternative to editing GIFs with simple clicks.
2. Tweak the GIF size, apply loop playback, add sticker/text, etc.
3. Produce colorful GIFs with 256-bit colors and hue adjustments.
4. Export GIFs with a maximum of 320 pixels and 10 frame rates.
Step 1: Free download WidsMob GIF and launch it on your computer. Click the GIF Editor button to start editing animated GIFs with this Photoshop alternative. Then, select the desired GIFs from your computer to upload.
Step 2: To trim the animated GIFs, you can simply move the slider at the bottom. Moreover, you can crop the size with customized values/presets, and adjust the filter of brightness, contrast, and saturation. After that, you can also add stickers or texts as watermarks from the top menu.
Step 3: Before exporting, you need to enhance the GIF by changing the quality to 100 and keeping the original frame rate. At last, click the Export GIF button to start the process.
Conclusion
Although Photoshop is very complex to use, you have known the detailed steps to edit animated GIFs in Photoshop after reading this article. Here is also a powerful and easy-to-use alternative – WidsMob GIF for you. Just like Photoshop, it can trim, crop, add text/image watermarks, and enhance GIF quality. Start following the steps to add your ideas for editing GIFs with/without Photoshop and create funny GIFs to make people laugh.