13th
How to open an animated gif in Photoshop CS3
If you try to open an animated gif in Photoshop CS3, you get the first frame and only the first frame. This is how it always was, but there used to be a fairly decent piece of software included with Photoshop called ImageReady which would open an animated gif with frames as layers, and allow you to edit frames, and basically do anything you wanted to do with an animated gif.
They discontinued ImageReady, probably because when Adobe bought Macromedia they got Fireworks which is basically the exact same thing as ImageReady. IR was getting pretty long-in-the-tooth anyway. They built some rudimentary animation stuff into Photoshop, but for some reason they didn’t seem to think that you would ever need to modify a pre-existing animated gif- it will still only open the first frame of an animation.
Here’s how to trick photoshop into opening an animated gif anyway:
- File -> Import Video Frames As Layers
- This dialog is limited to a few video filetypes. To open a gif, type *.gif in the file name textbox and press enter.
- Choose From Beginning To End and Make Frame Animation and hit OK.
That’s it. You’ll lose frame timings but that’s not a huge deal.
