by Melissa Raissa

Created on: July 22, 2010

A zoom effect allows you to gradually close in and focus on a particular object in a photo or image. This effect requires some sort of animation which you can usually achieve through flash and other applications. Although, you can also achieve the same results with GIF animations. These are image files that allow animation effects through the use of multiple frames within one image.

The original image will serve as the main frame or the close up of your zoom effect. We're doing this so that we don't pixelize the image, a probable result of zoom-in effects. Your animation or GIF file should then have a smaller dimension than your original image. We will be scale the image down several times to acquire the frames then arrange them later on according to the zoom type you want.

Open a photo or image with your GIMP program, preferably using a non-transparent image since we will be working with a GIF file. We will make the original layer invisible but continue to use it for creating the rest of the frames. Click on the “eye” icon beside the original image. This will help in protecting the original image from any changes done on the current file.

We will duplicate the original image by right-clicking on the corresponding layer then selecting Duplicate Layer. This will server as our first frame. Go back to the original image and duplicate the said layer again for our second frame. We will now scale this down by a few pixels using the Scale tool at the Toolbox or by clicking TOOLS->TRANSFORM TOOLS->SCALE at the menu bar.

In scaling, you should decide the ratio or interval of downsizing the image for uniformity. Since the second frame is now smaller than the first frame, we have to align them according to area you want to focus on. For this activity, we will be aligning the images toward the middle of the canvas using the Alignment Tool which looks like a white canvas with four arrows at each side.

At the menu bar, click TOOLS->TRANSFORM TOOLS->ALIGN then click on the layer you want to realign. At the Align Tool options, click on the middle-alignment buttons. The frame should be clickable so you can't apply the alignment if there's a frame or layer covering the entire frame that you want to work with. You can make the other frames invisible by clicking their “eye” icons.

Repeat the same steps starting from duplicating the original image to scaling and aligning the new layer frame. Just make sure the arrangement is in the correct order according to size, either zooming in or zooming out. You can preview the animation by clicking FILTERS->ANIMATION->PLAYBACK at the menu bar.

When you're done with all your frames, you might find that they don't have equal dimensions. To solve this, just find and click the frame with the smallest size. Then, at the menu bar click IMAGE->AUTOCROP IMAGE which should uniformly crop the rest of the frames. Save this file with a GIF extension and select the SAVE AS ANIMATION option.

Learn more about this author, Melissa Raissa.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.