How To Turn A Video Into A GIF In Photoshop

If you have a short video which you would like to transform into a gif file and publish on twitter/facbook etc. Howard Pinsky will show you a pretty quick way of doing this using Photoshop (and we will add some other methods).

So you have a cool short video or part of a video you want to turn into a gif. On this video Pinsky looks at how you can (currently) do this using Photoshop and some of the things that you should be aware of. First there is the length of the video – a couple of seconds (more or less) is all that gif will give you at the moment on most platforms (this might change in the future and it depends on several unrelated factors). Next there is the size of the file.

Both of these can be overcome to some extent by playing with the speed of the file (as Pinsky shows in the video) and with the way you save the file for web as gif which he also demonstrates.

Gifs are cool and this type of short video that loops and can be watched immediately is becoming more and more popular and we are pretty sure that these size and length limitations are going to go away. there are already some alternatives (or at least other options) such as webm which is a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML5 video tag sponsored by Google. It cam make better quality videos but it will taker time before it (might catch on).

In the meantime if you do not want to use Photoshop – you can use online services such as giphy or gfycat to upload and share your own gifs (and watch other peoples).

You can check out more of Pinsky’s videos on our Photoshop Channel here on LensVid as well as many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.