Creating animated images

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Add some free alternatives to Gimp as it seems clumsy regarding animations.

Photoshop

Preparation

Create a new RGB document and set its dimensions to a power of 2. Probably you want to make it between 64x64 and 256x256.

Enable the timeline with Window > Timeline. Create a video timeline. This gives you more possibilities with layers and effects. You will be able to set keyframes so that the changes between them are interpolated (created automatically).

Editing

Expand your layers (▼) in the video timeline to gain control over position, opacity and styles. Set or remove keyframes by clicking the diamond symbol (◆). A selected keyframe turns yellow.

A note about frames: When you zoom in on your animation (slider at bottom) the unit type turns from 's' to 'f'. The default fps (frames per second) of your timeline is seen at the bottom. If you don't want one second to be 30 frames long, see the dropdown options in the timeline panel.

Export

File > Export > Render video:

Change "Adobe Media Encoder" to "Photoshop image sequence".

Choose the TGA format.

The number of images depends on how long your animation is in seconds and at what fps you will export it.

For example, if your animation is 2s long and you set the fps to 24 fps you will get 48 images.

The fps can be anything, so you don't have to worry about frames and seconds.

When you've decided on your number of images, start the render.

Flash

Exporting Flash Animations tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMQ9dRLg4yY

Note: Flash is now obsolete, and its successor is Animate CC.

Gimp

From what I've seen 2016 on YouTube, I think Gimp has a "one image per detail change" workflow, which would mean you have to create every single image yourself.