How to make a GIF by 90steens

Okay, So I want to create a gif on a scene where Emma Roberts from American Horror Story is dancing. Here's how I go about it:

1. Open Adobe Photoshop. I'm using cs5.

2. Select File, Import and click video frames to layers. Choose the video you want to create a GIF out of. NB: Your workspace should be in "Motion" or else you can't edit the GIF you want to create out of a video.

3. Once you have selected the video, a pop-up window appears. Making an entire video a GIF is not possible as it will be larger than 1MB so just take out the important scenes in it. Use the "selected range" option to do that. Select OK.

4. You can delete more of the scenes if they are too many, as social sites such as twitter and tumblr selects GIFs which are less than 1MB. Press CTRL + select the frames you want to delete and click on the garbage can underneath. you can also crop out the parts which are unimportant to reduce space. Note, that before you do this, you need to press CTRL+ALT+A to select all the layers and crop it seemingly. you can also edit it by clicking the B/W circle at the bottom of the layers tab at the right side.

5. Once editing, click File and select "Save for Web & Devices". Here is the main part you would want to make your GIF less than 1MB. (NB: GIF files larger than 1MB do not work!) Reduce colors that are not important and increase image size width to 500 (horizontal display for tumblr/any social network) then under the GIF button, select the option that is good for your GIF ( I often prefer selective because it also reduces the size) then, click on that small menu icon on the top right side and select optimize to file size. type in 1000 and select OK. NB: this reduces your GIF file size to less than 1MB and can sometimes distort it, so you have to delete more frames in order to get the perfect GIF. Then select save.