How To Edit A GIF Without Photoshop On Windows
GIF is a popular image format and creating GIFs is pretty easy. There are tools that let you record a screencast and save it as a GIF. There are quite a few tools that can create high quality GIFs. Imgur has a dedicated tool for creating GIFs from YouTube videos. It’s pretty easy to create a GIF if you already have a video, or if it’s a GIF of your desktop. What’s not as easy to do is edit a GIF. By editing, we don’t just mean adding text or resizing a GIF. We mean editing individual frames, adding text, reversing direction, speeding up playback, and more. Photoshop can create and edit GIFs but it’s not a cheap or easy-to-use app. Here’s how you can edit a GIF without Photoshop using a free app called ScreenToGif.
ScreenToGif has been covered before. It’s a great app that lets you record a screencast and save it as a GIF. It’s also a great GIF editor.
Download a GIF you want to edit. Open ScreenToGif and from the File tab, select ‘Load’. Select the GIF you want to open, and the app will show you all frames in the GIF.
You can select the individual frames, or multiple frames in an image and delete them. If you have the perfect GIF that’s just a bit too long, you can use ScreenToGif to trim it down. Frames can be removed from the start, end, or middle of the GIF. You can also cut a frame from its original position and paste it elsewhere in the GIF from the Home tab.
If you want to resize the GIF, go to the Image tab and click ‘Resize’. Enter custom dimensions for the GIF and the app will resize it. The same tab is where you can add text, a watermark, a free-hand drawing, a title frame, and a caption to the GIF.
Go to the Edit tab to speed up or slow down GIF, or to reverse the direction it is played in. The controls are self-explanatory and one-click actions.
ScreenToGif is easy to use, it’s free, and it’s open source. Those are three things that Photoshop is not. Creating or editing a GIF in Photoshop isn’t easy. If you know how to use the app, you won’t have too much trouble. If however you’re not in the design trade, you need a way to edit a GIF without Photoshop. You also need to make sure a GIF doesn’t lose its quality. This app has you covered on all fronts.
