By Dan Moren
July 30, 2015 9:07 AM PT
GIFBrewery, for all your animated GIF creating needs
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I’m not a frequent GIF-maker by any means–and there’s no shortage of excellent GIFs out there–but sometimes an animated image is the only real way to convey exactly what you’re feeling.
I’ve played with a bunch of different tools for making GIFs, and I’ve found them to be a mixed bag–especially the web-based ones, which all too often restrict certain features for “premium” users, or produce less than great quality results.
But I’ve been pretty pleased with GIFBrewery for OS X. It handles the videos I’ve imported with aplomb, supports cropping, resizing, and very easy trimming, which is key when making a good GIF.1 And because producing a compact animated image is important, it also lets you reduce the number of frames, change the delay between them, and simplify the color palette.
GIFBrewery also has probably the strongest text tools I’ve found, giving you full control over fonts, colors, alignment, and even when the text fades in or out.
Honestly, my GIF needs are pretty simple, so I haven’t even had a chance to use all of the advanced features that GIFBrewery has: image overlays, visual filters, rotating/mirroring frames, and so on.
For the $5 asking price, seems to me you can’t do much better.
- I’ve recently been importing video clips from playing Destiny, which the Xbox One by default records in 30 second increments–too long for most GIFs. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
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