Sometimes a GIF alone isn't plenty; sometimes you lot want to add a piffling bit of text. Photoshop can do the job, merely the process isn't as intuitive as y'all'd imagine, especially if you've never edited blitheness in Photoshop before.

When you import a GIF in Photoshop, you'll notice that every frame shows up in "Layers." Notably, changing the order of the layers does not change the order that frames play dorsum in. What's going on, exactly?

To discover out, yous demand to open the Timeline window, which y'all'll find under Window > Timeline.

This volition add a new window, where you lot can encounter the frames in your GIF, and even hitting the play button to preview playback.

Things tin get a little confusing, so let's review. For the purposes of our practice…

  • The Timeline window lets y'all control what society your frames play back in, and to preview your animation.
  • The Layers window controls which frames transparent overlays will testify up over. An overlay at the top of the list volition show up over all frames, for example.

With access to this, let's go ahead and add our overlay. For this case, we'll be calculation text, so create a text box as you ordinarily would.

As ever, your text will be added in a new layer. Go ahead and drag this overlay to the top of your layers listing.

Simply like that, your text overlay will show up over all of your GIF.

If that's all you desire to do, you're done! But if yous want your overlay to bear witness upwards at a certain signal in the animation, things get a piddling more than complicated. Elevate your text box to the middle to meet what I mean.

In my example, doing this caused the text to show up for the showtime half of the frames, then disappear.

That's probably the opposite of what you lot want, and the just fashion to set it is to rearrange all of your layers. Drag the early on frames to the top of the listing, put your text in the eye.

This makes information technology possible for your text to prove up halfway through the GIF. Y'all can even add together another bit of text, later on.

Go it?

Getting things just right can take a while, but play with the layer order long enough and your text will show up exactly when you lot want it to.

When you're ready, I advise you click File > Salve For Spider web to export the GIF; you'll get a lot of command over the quality, which can help reduce file size. Bask your newly consummate GIF!