Pixen 3: going Ninja on an Animated Gif

Had the need to change the background colour on an animated Gif file this week – and yes, I know they aren’t flavour of the year right now, but I have a client who loves his Gif (no names – no packdrill) and with the move to a cleaner, CSS based site happening, it looked like curtains for the old Gif.

I was just on the verge of digging around in the Loft for an old Paint Shop Pro disc with JASC Animation Studio on it (they have dropped the program now, so it’s no longer available) and loading it up on to one of the Windows Virtual Machines I have on the iMac, when I realised I hadn’t even tried to see if there was a native Mac App to accomplish the same thing! Shame on me!

So a bit of a ‘Google’ later, I had turned up a program called Pixen 3 by the Open Sword Group – it’s tag line is “pushing Pixels to the Limit” and from a cursory read through the quite impressively long spec, it seemed it would do the job for me.

It’s a free download, and then ‘Donation-ware’ i.e. if you use it, slip the Dev some $$’s – so you get a chance to see if it fits the bill for you before you part with any cash – nice!

After a little trial and error, I had imported the Animated Gif file in as a series of images or Frames and could now work on each one individually. As Pixen 3 is a pixel editor, there are no ‘brushes’ as you would be used to with other image editing tools, but thankfully for my requirements, there is a ‘Fill’ tool, and that worked fine for changing the colour of the backgrounds on my Frames.

It was then a simple matter of reversing the import procedure, and exporting the Frames as an animated Gif, and I had the new Gif with the right coloured background to drop on to my clients new site.

Now I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Pixen 3 is capable of, but yet again, those Mac Devs have come through for me in my search for a Mac App to replace a Windows Program.

Have any Mac Apps you’ve used to replace a Windows Program when you Switched? we’d love to hear about it.

Wiz