LICEcap is a handy and reliable program designed to capture selections of your screen and export them to high quality GIF animations. Easily create desktop tutorials. It can also save the. LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to.GIF (for viewing in web browsers, etc) or.LCF. LICEcap is an intuitive but flexible application (for Windows and now OSX), that is designed to be lightweight and function with high performance. Record directly to.GIF or.LCF. Move the screen capture frame while.

Following on from our blog on ‘Making animated GIFs in Adobe After Effects’ we recently found another handy tool to aid GIF creation, this time for screen capture. LICEcap is a free piece of software that allows you to record your screen, with the option to output as a GIF file. We found this to be really useful in allowing us to quickly create animated GIFS which we’ve used to demo content on our website and in presentations. Restaurant city hack.

When to use GIFs?

Before you begin, you should assess whether your content is suitable for this purpose. GIF files can only contain a maximum of 256 colours. As a result, they work best with images that contain simple shapes and a limited colour palette, as the example below shows:

If you create a GIF from a detailed photograph you are likely to notice a reduction in quality. However, it doesn’t mean you should rule out using photos completely. Stripping back the colours in your photography can result in a ‘grungy’ look, which can be very effective as the example below shows:

So how does LICEcap work?

Once installed, all you need to do is resize the recording window to fit the content you wish to capture, set the maximum frames per second (MAX FPS) and hit ‘Record’. We set the MAX FPS to 24, which is a standard rate for animation. Simply hit ‘Stop’ when you’re finished and the GIF will be saved in your selected location.

Licecap Gif

Why use Photoshop?

The outputted GIF from LICEcap can be edited in Adobe Photoshop to remove any unwanted screens and refine the animation. To do this, open the GIF and using the timeline window delete any redundant frames by selecting the frame and clicking on the bin icon.

You can also change the delay time of each frame to suit your animation. We changed this to ‘No delay’ for a smoother animation. To do this select all frames, click on the time at the bottom, select a predefined time from the list or ‘Other’ to enter your own. If you’re going to loop your animation it’s good idea to have a pause on the last frame of 1-2 seconds – so set this individually.
When saving your final animation, go to ‘File’, ‘Export’ and ‘Save for Web’. The window below is displayed, allowing you to alter the settings to get the right balance between file size and quality. Try reducing the number of colours to bring the file size down. You can also set the looping options in this window to play ‘Once’, ‘Forever’ or a specified number of times.
In summary, LICEcap is a great capture tool, but Photoshop is it’s perfect partner to give you more control over the final output!

LICEcap is a simple but effective Windows and Mac screen capture tool which records your desktop activity, and saves it as an animated GIF.

The program is very easy to use. Launch the program and there's no clutter, no menus, no complex settings: just a window which you can resize and drag to whatever area you'd like to capture.

Once that's done, clicking 'Record' gives you a few useful options. So you might enter a title, which will be displayed at the beginning of the animation. LICEcap can highlight mouse clicks, handy for tutorials. And you can specify how many times the animation should repeat (or just leave it to run forever).

Licecap Installer

Enter a file name, click Save, and LICEcap immediately begins recording the area you've specified. And so you'll need to launch a program, open a dialog, browse some menus, or whatever else you're intending to do. Once you've finished, click Stop, and the animated GIF will be saved, ready for use.

There are plenty of issues here. You can't capture the full desktop, for example. Animations of any size or length will produce very large files. And GIFs only support 256 colours, so they're not going to look great.

Saving the animation to a regular image file does mean you'll be able to use and play it just about anywhere, though, and LICEcap's simplicity is another major plus. It's definitely worth a look.

Version 1.26 brings:
- Windows 8.1+ high-DPI fix

Licecap Big Sur

Verdict:

Small, simple and easy to use, LICEcap is a great way to take animated screen captures which you can reuse and play almost anywhere