Welcome to my tutorial on How to make an animated signature just like the one shown below! In this tutorial you will have the knowledge on how to make a simple gif and how they're created. I will go in depth as to what you will need to do in each step and provide clear screenshots and indicate where everything is in each step.

In this tutorial I'll show you how to make a simple shine on text like shown below.



1. Create a new canvas and put in the words you wish to make shine, for this tutorial I'll be using my name. For anyone wishing to know my font it is Lobster.



2. Next create a new layer and call it Gradient, this is what will make your imagine look like a shine is going over it.



3. Next head over and select the Gradient tool over on the side. If you cannot spot the tool it can be hiding behind the bucket tool so go over to it, right click it and select the Gradient tool.



4. Next head to the top of the page and you should see a little Gradient display of what Gradient you currently have, we need to change it so double click on it to open up the Gradient Editor menu.



5. Now that you're in the Gradient Editor menu, go down and double click on the arrow along the bottom and on the LEFT side (Red Circle), for this tutorial I will be making it white but you can make the colour anything you wish. Once you've chosen your colour, go to the top right of the box and select that by clicking it once (Blue Circle), you should see a menu along the bottom and a box that says Opacity, change that to 0%.



6. Once you have done that, now select your Gradient layer and go from the left side of the canvas and go in about 1 cm, do NOT go across the whole canvas.



7. Now that you have your gradient, go over to your Gradient layer and duplicate it by right clicking the layer and selecting "Duplicate Layer"



8. Select your Gradient copy layer (Green Circle) and press Ctrl + T (Blue Circle) and head up to the top menu, change the degree of the first box to "-180" to make it flip (Red Circle) and then press the tick to save changes.



9. Now move your original Gradient layer over and put it up against the other Gradient so that they touch and make a fade in and fade back out effect like show below (Red Circle). Once you've done that right click your Gradient copy layer and go Merge Down (Blue Circle), MAKE SURE YOUR ORIGINAL GRADIENT IS UNDER THIS LAYER.



10. Once you have your two gradients in one layer, go down to your layers, hold the Alt button and put your mouse in-between your text layer and the gradient layer and click and it should clip like so. You'll know if its worked if your gradient is now only inside your text (Blue Circle) and that there is an arrow pointing down to the layer underneath (Red Circle)



11. Now that everything is ready you'll need to be able to view your Animation bar, by default you shouldn't have this on but if you do skip this step. To see your animation bar, go up to "Window" and click on "Animation", a bar along the bottom should appear as shown below.



12. Now the fun part, move your gradient so it isn't sitting inside of your text but right next to your text so it is ready to move. Once you have starting point, press the paper icon similar to the one when you create a new layer (Red Circle) to make a new frame, now with your gradient selected and the move tool selected, hold your right arrow key for about each second and keep making a new frame after each movement. Don't make them too big or else it won't look realistic enough. If you don't want it to keep looping, add about 5-10 extra frames at the end so it stays normal for a little bit.



13. Now since gifs don't allow transparent particles around images, we'll need a background colour, make sure it completely fits the area in where you want the gif to go, for this example it will be inside this thread, take a screenshot of the thread area, open it up in Photoshop and copy the colour and make that colour the background of your gif. In the end you should have around 30 frames if you followed everything I did and 3 layers, Background, Text and Gradient.



14. With everything complete go up to "File > Save for Web & Devices". If you wish to know what my settings are they're shown below, make sure you have selected GIF and select save. Select the Format as "Images Only" and make sure when you save your file you add .gif on the end. For example Sir.gif so it saves as a gif file.



You should now have a fully functional animated signature! Just upload it to an image sharing site such as https://imgur.com to see it live and upload it to a forum or set it as a signature. Using this exact same method you can do a whole heap of other things such as making normal text go from normal and slowly blurry and back to normal, be creative make things disappear and reappear! Thank you for using this tutorial and any feedback would be great!