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Comment by shortformblog | Hacker News Reader

I use Krita for Photoshop-type stuff, and it works great. It is the only good solution I've found in FOSS-land for animated GIFs, and finding it made it easier to wean off Photoshop. Not even commercial alternatives to Photoshop offer frame-based GIF editing. But Krita, fortunately, does.

I know they have a different focus these days, but it'd be nice if they promoted this.

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Photoshop can do GIF editing per frame. At least, my old copy of CS2 could.

It just represents each frame as a single layer in the stack, and then combines them in order on export to GIF.

Nowhere near as nice as using an animation tool-style horizontal timeline, but it does work in a pinch.

More recent versions of Photoshop have a frame-based editing setup that can be modified by hand, allowing use of filters and similar tools. This feature has essentially been ignored by every commercial alternative to Photoshop (Affinty, Pixelmator, etc.), which is why I don’t use them. I edit a lot of GIFs.

Krita allows you to import videos or even other GIFs as frame-based animations, which you can then modify to your desire, even adding things like filters or layering images.

I bet the UI is nicer for Krita gif editing than the GIMP animation plugin. Time to spend time learning it for a few GIFs I’d like to make.

My recommended strategy is to create a document to your preferred size and then go to File -> Import Animation Frames. You can import video or existing GIFs from there. The animation workspace is good for this, of course.

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