Resizing an Animation
Using JASC's Animation Shop

Since large animations take a long time to load on the web they often need to be resized.
Let's take the animation above and resize it. It may look long but only takes a very short time.
If you'd like to use this image to practice with go here and download it to your hard drive.

 2. I like to work with my animations in layers and it will be easier for this tutorial. To do that--before opening your image--go to File>Preferences>General Program Preferences and click on the Layered Files tab. Set it up like I have in the image below and click OK.

 3. Now open your image in Animation Shop. What we have is an animation that is 350 x 350 and almost 90K. This is much larger than I want on my web page. Go to Edit>Select All. Now go to Animation>Resize Animation. See image below.

 3. At this point you will probably notice that your frame images are a little soft. This is the same thing that happens in PSP when you resize an image. See image below.

 4. Let's sharpen the images. Make sure you have PSP open. All the frames should still be selected. On your toolbar click on the 3rd button from the left. See image below.

 5. The image will open in PSP. While it looks like a single image, all your frames are there as layers. Click on each layer and sharpen it. See image below.

 6. Close your image in PSP. When you start to close you will see the dialog box below. Just answer "YES" and go back to Animation Shop. All your frames should be sharp.

 7. All that's left to do is save the new image. Go to File>Save and go through the optimizer screens. When you get to the next to the last one you can see your image size. You have reduced your file size by almost half. If it's still too big back up to the screen with the slider and pull it down a notch or two. It doesn't always have to be at the top setting and will reduce your file size a lot.

 8. Click Finish and you're done. Once you know how this is done it will take you about a minute and a half to do. Here's our final image.

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Tutorial and images © Griffin Images 2002