The History of The GIF

It was developed with US software by Steve Wilhite while he was working on internet service provider CompuServe in 1987. The original GIF format was called 87a which is not as versatile as the GIF format of today, for example with the GIF 87a format you didn’t have much control over display fonts. In 2012 the GIF was introduced into the dictionary. In the 1980’s and 1990’s GIF was used as a form of advertisement, many companies’ used them to promote their business.

Purpose of my GIF

My GIF features Harambe with the writing saying “pray 4 harambe” this GIF is a joke and I could put this on social media for other people’s entertainment. The platform I would put it on would be Instagram or Facebook, and I would show it to my friends and anyone else who would want to see it on Instagram and Facebook.

How I created my GIF

1) I firstly set my image size to width 500 and height 333 and this was because this is an appropriate size for my GIF also I was given guidance by a reliable source to stick to this size it is also 72 dots per inch.

2) I then inserted this Harambe picture into Photoshop as this will be my background picture and this relates to the GIF I am creating.

3) After I inserted the Harambe picture I started to put text on over the picture of Harambe which will eventually spell out “Pray 4 Harambe”, I made each letter a different color as it creates more of a stand out effect.

This is the finished Harambe text that is on the picture.

4) I then changed the effect of the text as when I put it on at first the text did not stand out and the background picture covered the text a bit. The effect was called ‘Inner shadow’ and this made the text stand out as it does now in the final GIF form.

5) I then created a Timeline which I created 12 different frames for and set the time to 0.2 seconds as this is an appropriate time scale and seems to fit with the GIF, on each frame it has a different letter that spells out “Pray 4 Harambe”

6) Then after I had finished editing and creating the GIF I went to ‘Export’ and then to ‘Save for web (Legacy)’ and this brings up the next window which allows me to edit the GIF further and change more detailed settings.

7) This window now opened after selecting ‘Save for Web (Legacy)’ and this allows me to edit the GIF in more detail , in this window I selected the amount of colors to 256 to give the GIF a more detailed effect and I set the looping option to one I didn’t change any of the other settings and left it like this .

8) I then placed the GIF into google chrome where it preformed the sequence I had created it to do. It worked perfectly fine and looked good. This is how you create a fully working GIF using photo shop.