GIF Construction Set Professional 3

Every once in a while I might add small tutorials to some of the reviews I am writing, and such is the case of the GIF Construction Set Professional 3, in order to extend the examples and the reasons for using such software. The need to create animated images has become quite obvious when the development of the websites has evolved towards a more dynamic content.

The GIF Construction software has a very simple and quite intuitive interface, that integrates easily with windows Vista and it has even a wizard that can help you create animated GIF images. The Graphics Interchange Format files were introduced in 1987 and this format has been supported ever since on the World Wide Web due to the portability, transparency and support capabilities that it has to offer.

Due to the limitation of the format to 256 distinct colors from the 24-bit color space, it is recommended only for simple images, such as logos and small animated banners. I must say that this piece of software does what it was designed to do very well, but it needs the very cool collection of plug-ins that can be found on the same website where you can get the Gif Construction software.

Applicability: Well, here we are at the small tutorial part. I’m going to tell you how you can create a very nice small and interactive banner for your website. First you need to make some frames for your animation. The first step is to choose correctly the software that will create them. I have chosen Photoshop by default as it is the application I trust most when it comes to web-image graphics creation. I have created a simple PSD file that has a transparent background (150 pixels height, 60 pixels width) and then inserted a centered text. But not all the text at once - one character at a time, and I saved the image as a PNG file each time I added a letter. And so I came up with about 20 PNG static frames. Then, I used the GIF Construction Set to join them together in an animation as you can see in the screenshots above. After joining the frame-images, I saved the file as a GIF animated image and, as expected it looks very well and it doesn’t even have a big size (about 20 KB only!). You can see the final result at the beginning of this paragraph.

Pro(s): The GIF animation builder has a lot to offer in terms of software value – you can easily regain your investment by creating animated banners and integrate them into websites or simply sell them. You can also export the animations into the flash SWF format, AVI or MOV video files with sound!

Con(s): I wish I could see the interface a bit changed in future versions, even if this software is not new –actually it has been on the market for some years. There weren’t any significant changes when they adapted it for Vista as well. At one point the software just crashed and closed down, but it was probably under “heavy pressure”.

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Buy: $24.99
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