how to make a GIF with only ONE element in the picture moving?

All you do is make a series of images saved as GIF and stack them into an animation with a program. So just use photoshop with various layers where you've just masked out a single portion of the frame to show through from the bottom layers. Change visibiliy and export as a GIF frame. Repeat for all frames.

There you go! OPP, do you understand? Questions?

Because of the limitation of 256 colors and the large file sizes of animated gifs that can only be viewed with your favorite browser, I think even a resolution of 1080p would not work well.

I think the best way to do an animated or cinemagraphic image is by shooting it on video first. Although the following doesn't exactly fit what the OP was asking about, here's a quick example I did.

I opened a 1080p video clip I shot some time ago in a video editor, Vegas Pro, in this instance and selected 3 seconds that I thought would loop well and rendered it out at a resolution of 480 x 320 at 30 fps. I then imported that 3 second clip into Photoshop and chose to use every other frame. That gave me a total of 50 frames for the clip at 15 fps. I then saved for web as an animated gif that looped forever. This 3 second clip wound up having a file size of 3.7mb.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

That came out really well!

Navydoc, i would consider that as a movie that is saved as a gif. What the op is looking for is something in the photo that is static with something showing movement. Here is another one i did as a test. My 5D is only 3 frames per second and not capable of doing movies so i couldn't do a really good job of making the bird fly like it normally do but it was just a test...

Microsoft Cliplets could work also.

Edsport wrote in post #15593588
Navydoc, i would consider that as a movie that is saved as a gif. What the op is looking for is something in the photo that is static with something showing movement. ...

Yeah, I knew my example wasn't exactly what the OP was looking for and the "Cliplets" program looks pretty good but the source is still a video. That was the point I was trying to make.

Photoshop Workbench 368: Cinemagraphs Revisited

tkbslc wrote in post #15593185
Animated GIF limits your quality way more than 1080p. And what's the point of making a GIF larger than a computer screen? I'd say 600x900 would be about the biggest you'd want to go.

Maybe he wants to retain maximum quality when he prints it out.

:p

If you have an iPhone or iPad you could try this

http://echographapp.co​m/#

navydoc wrote in post #15593426
Because of the limitation of 256 colors and the large file sizes of animated gifs that can only be viewed with your favorite browser, I think even a resolution of 1080p would not work well.

I think the best way to do an animated or cinemagraphic image is by shooting it on video first. Although the following doesn't exactly fit what the OP was asking about, here's a quick example I did.

I opened a 1080p video clip I shot some time ago in a video editor, Vegas Pro, in this instance and selected 3 seconds that I thought would loop well and rendered it out at a resolution of 480 x 320 at 30 fps. I then imported that 3 second clip into Photoshop and chose to use every other frame. That gave me a total of 50 frames for the clip at 15 fps. I then saved for web as an animated gif that looped forever. This 3 second clip wound up having a file size of 3.7mb.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

this looks pretty good. seems that it's more work trying to use stills to create the gifs instead.

assuming i'm making them from video instead, is there a way to automate the process then? i.e. like a one-click conversion from a 3 second .mp4 cutout to a gif, from 60fps reduced to 15fps.

hawaiiboy wrote in post #15604317
If you have an iPhone or iPad you could try this

http://echographapp.co​m/#

on android for now, and i wouldn't trust my tablet/phone cam's quality for the job

the.forumer wrote in post #15612280
this looks pretty good. seems that it's more work trying to use stills to create the gifs instead.

assuming i'm making them from video instead, is there a way to automate the process then? i.e. like a one-click conversion from a 3 second .mp4 cutout to a gif, from 60fps reduced to 15fps.

If you had already created a 3 second video with in and out points that would loop well, I suppose it's possible to create an action in Photoshop to create the animated gif from it. If the video is 60fps, you'd probably want to only import every 4th frame to keep the file size reasonable.

navydoc wrote in post #15612333
If you had already created a 3 second video with in and out points that would loop well, I suppose it's possible to create an action in Photoshop to create the animated gif from it.

Check out the Timeline panel.

That works too but I don't see a way to reduce the framerate to something like 15fps before it's saved as a gif. This just means the file size will be much larger than needed really.

If there is a way to change the framerate prior to saving as a gif without rendering the clip out to video first, I haven't found it yet.