|
Animated graphics, also called animated gifs, are rapidly becoming the norm on pages across the web. What are animated gifs? Well, for me, they are
the moving pictures on other people's pages. Who's down with OPP? You got it.Animated gifs have been around for a couple of years, but I didn't really notice them until now. I wanted to learn how to make my own
animated graphics, and I was surprised how truly easy it is to do, even for a beginner. That's why I wrote this article. What if you want to add your own animated graphics to your web page? The first thing you have to
do is find a paint program that will save your files with a .gif extension, which is what you need for animated graphics. The letters g-i-f stand for graphics interchange format, which is one of many files formats for
graphics. The second thing you have to do is find an animation program that will loop sequences of your graphics, thereby creating animation. They only read gifs, which is why we're on the subject in the first place.
There are a number of shareware programs that can be found on the Internet designed to help you create or manage animated graphics. Shareware is software that you can download and use for a while without paying for it.
Usually after 30 days, the shareware will no longer run except to let you fill out an order form and submit it. I checked out some of this shareware recently, and that's how I made my first animated graphic.
PAINT SHOP PRO
The first
software I downloaded was Paint Shop Pro [PSP] version 4.12 Shareware by Jasc, Inc. Paint Shop Pro is totally cool! It's full of wonderful image editing features; it's got thorough help screens; and it is a breeze
to download, install, and --best of all -- use, even for a beginner. It is similar enough to typical paintbrush programs, making it feel instantly familiar, but its advanced features give you the ability to produce the
awesome graphics you want. Download information is at the end of this article.The program is pretty user-friendly. It starts off with a tip screen that gives you useful information about some of the functions. Once
you're running PSP, you see a blank workspace with two rows of buttons and a style bar on top, a palette on the right and a histogram, whatever that is. I told you this was new to me. As with most Windows programs, you
can choose what to view or hide by clicking "View" at the top of the screen and either checking or unchecking the appropriate item. Pointing at one of the buttons on a bar causes a description of its function
to appear at the bottom of the screen. That makes getting started very easy. One of the handiest features is "browse," which lets you view all the graphics in a directory at once so you can easily choose
which one you want. Because most graphic filenames don't give an accurate description of the of the graphic itself, you need to see the file before opening it. In other words, you can spend a lot of time using
"open" over and over again and wondering what the heck that image you saved the other day was called, or you can use browse once for the whole session and be done with it. The browse window stays open until
you close it, allowing you to pop back to it to choose more files to work on. Or you can always create a new image from scratch. To create a new file you must first decide the size of your graphic, which can be
changed later, like any other property of the image. This is nice to know when you're not exactly sure what you're doing. And, don't forget, there's always UNDO, which reverses the last change you made to the graphic.
PSP's help index covers everything, so if trial and error don't work, you can actually read the instructions. To save images from OPPs, there is a "screen capture" function. You can set it as a keyboard
button or as your right mouse button. I already have that function available in my browser, but this is more than that. You can capture an entire screen from any application in your computer. Let's say you want to show
someone how to perform a task in a word-processing program, but it's more than you've been able to describe verbally over the phone. You can capture the entire screen of the program and e-mail it to that person as a
graphic. Or capture just part of the screen. "Capture" could also be used for creating presentations or help screens. |
|
