How to Create Animated GIFs

If you’ve been to my blog at least a few times before, one thing you would’ve noticed for sure is that I absolutely love GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format)! Those little animations or “mini-videos” that you see in a lot of my posts. I started doing them at the beginning of this year and since then I have loved creating GIFs any chance I get. I’ve always been a visual learner and GIFs certainly appeal to that part of me. GIFs are a great way to convey a lot of things that you possibly couldn’t with words. Especially on food blogs.

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For e.g.
1) A couple of GIFs in this post show you the jiggle in a panna cotta (which is a hallmark of a perfect panna cotta) and the action of splitting open a hibiscus syrup filled sphere that I made using molecular gastronomy.
2) This GIF shows you how to fold filo sheets with the filling inside to make cranberry, cheese & turkey filo rolls.
3) There’s a GIF in this post that shows the action of pouring hot caramel over my blackberry cannoli cream crepe cake, which totally captures that food porn quality of it.
4) Here’s another example of some molecular gastronomy magic where I make raspberry caviar that suspend in a lychee cocktail.
5) Then this GIF here shows you how my homemade raspberry chocolate magic shell sauce hardens into a crisp, snappy shell when poured over a cold popsicle.
6) And finally this GIF shows the texture of this Sri Lankan spiced baked coconut custard (which also happens to be dairy free and insanely delicious!).

GIFs are pretty easy to make once you get the hang of it, and they can be a very handy tool to use on your blog. Over the past year, a lot of bloggers have asked me how I made GIFs, and I finally got around to putting together a little video tutorial to show you exactly how I made them.

This is the GIF that I’ll be showing you how to make in the videos.

So here we go. My first video on the blog. 🙂 A video detailing HOW TO MAKE GIFS, using Photoshop and also using this free online tool (for those who don’t have access to Photoshop). So whether you call them GIFs (with a hard G) or JIFs (which just sounds totally weird, I gotta say), these animations can be a very powerful tool that can convey things that you just can’t with a still image.

I do hope that I can show you STEP BY STEP, how to create fun GIFs for your own blog through these videos. Please note that the colours in the videos, don’t reflect the final quality of the GIF – for some reason the video shows some colour distortion.

[bctt tweet=”LEARN HOW TO MAKE ANIMATED GIFs with The Flavor Bender!! A great tool for blogs! #Tutorial”]

The first video is an introduction and how to take photographs to make an animated GIF.

The second video explains how to EDIT the photos, RAW format using Lightroom, but you can do the same thing using Photoshop too.

The third video shows you HOW TO CREATE THE GIF. This covers how to make a GIF using PHOTOSHOP, with tricks to add watermarks, plus any last minute adjustments that you’d like to make.

So you don’t have Photoshop? No sweat. The last video explains HOW TO CREATE A GIF, WITHOUT PHOTOSHOP. You can use this free online tool for this purpose. It’s not as perfect as Photoshop, but still pretty darn good.

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PART 1

Links for Part 1

Continuous Mode for Canon

Continuous Mode for Nikon

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4 – A web based tool to create Animated GIFs

Web based tool to make GIFs – EzGif Maker

When you’re using the online GIF making tool –

Make sure your images are smaller in dimension. It’ll be easier to handle, and faster – since the size of the file will be manageable.

The GIF made with the web based tool

I do hope these videos inspire you to create GIFs for your own blog too, and if you find this tutorial helpful, do share it with your friends too. I’d love to see your work too, so let me know.

If you do have any questions, leave a comment below or shoot me a quick message. Good luck and have fun making GIFs! 🙂

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