So I went on a little Learning Curve Rabbit Hole today to do today’s The Daily Create, #tdc2750 which is called Thesaurus Fun.

It all started when I went to do a screen capture on my iPad of the thesaurus for tumble, which was just a word that I picked out of the air, and then when I was looking at the words I liked some of them so I thought I would put a little Tina face beside them so you would know that they were special. So I put the screen capture into the Keynote program on my iPad because that is what I do sometimes when I want to make a thing quickly, with layers, before I can do a screen capture to make the final picture for Twitter. I just went to my Twitter and got my picture and made it really small and put it where it needed to go. Then I decided that some words were better than others so I made copies of my picture right beside each other, like a kind of Tina rating scale.

Still, the pictures were kind of small to move for my fingers on the iPad, and I wanted them to be all lined up with each other, so I thought, “I will make it go through the iCloud to my computer and then I can do a select multiple and an align centre for all of the ones in one column and they will look neat!” So I did that.

But then I started to think it would look even better as an animated GIF (because doesn’t almost everything?) and so I wondered how I could make it export so I could GIF it. But then I found out that Keynote does an Export as GIF one now! FUN! So I did that.

But, sad face! The GIF was too big! it was 14 MB, which is a bit much, even for a really good GIF art. I opened it up in Photoshop to confirm my thinking, and found that it was made of all flattened layers, with everything on every layer which makes things really big.

So I thought, I guess I better do it the right way! So I made a PDF of one page and then opened it in Photoshop and then made each little Tina face into it’s own layer so I could turn them on one at a time with just the background screen capture that I started with way back when as the background in it just one time,

It was a lot of work, and in the end I just went back to making copies of the same Tina face (like I did way back in Keynote on my iPad) but in the end, it made a good GIF. It was only 44 KB, which is about 347 times smaller! Then I made it 1:2 for the Twitter, and added my face and the The Daily Create #2750 and URL references, and in the end it was only 146 KB with that added goodness! (Plus, the GIF is 1000 pixels wide, so if you want to embiggen it to read better, you can!)

Then I wrote this little post about it, and now I am back out of the Rabbit Hole! Bye!