Wide World of Women

Can anyone suggest a program that allows you to simply create quality looking animated gif banners? I have used ImageReady in the past... but I have never fully grasped the proper way to go about making them (I use this method that is not only time consuming, but wrong). I have read numerous tutorials and unfortunately, that is the only thing that I cannot ever do correctly within Photoshop / ImageReady.

So can anyone direct me to a simpler software program? Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

Never mind...

I found a whole slew of them. If anyone is interested in the ones that I am trying out... I will report back and let you know which I liked best.

I used to use the old MS GIF animator which was pretty easy to use, the quality was okay but not great. I also have macromedia 8, but I don't know what the eff I'm doing with that, all I've learned is how to create/publish a few short swf's. but it seem you can publish animated GIF's with that too.

Please do post a list of some good ones. I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd be interested. Over the years I have found a ton of cool programs looking through this forum.

Well, in the end I decided to go with a program that creates flash files. Why? Because the majority of the animated gif programs that I tested had horrible text and effects (maybe they wouldn't have looked so bad back in 1998, but they certainly are not up to par with the standards of today).

So I tried out a few programs that could create flash animations. It was pretty apparent from using 3-4 before the one that I am about to mention below that the highly publicized "easy to use" touting ad copy that most of these programs boasts aren't accurate.

So I installed and uninstalled one by one until I came upon one that I didn't [uninstall]. And that program is called KoolMoves - by far the simplest software that I have ever used with regard to graphics. I like to learn by using (as opposed to reading tutorials), and let me tell you, I was able to create a professional looking banner on my first attempt. You can also generate gif's from your flash files by saving and importing into graphic software such as Adobe ImageReady.

Easily worth the price, I tried for years to create animated gifs in ImageReady with little success. The banners that I've created in KoolMoves are above and beyond anything that I have ever created with ImageReady.

Give it a try if you'd like with the free trial at: http://www.koolmoves.com/

The others that I tried (that I can remember) were Animated GIF Producer and Flash Effect Maker Pro. Horrible compared to both the quality and ease of use of KoolMoves. But please, give them all a try and let me know your own thoughts on each.

Good info.

Cool, I'll check that out. First though I'm going to try the demo for Ulead.

I'm planning on making a ytmnd page. I certainly will not never ever don't not do forget not to put a link up for it cos it'd likely get me in deep doo-doo!

ytmnd.com is just the stupidest and most random stuff that makes me laugh my butt off. Usually its just a few pics, a bad font and a sound wav of a movie quote. But I'll be going the tougher route by creating an animated gif.