So yeah. I have gotten my personal laptop. Now, I want move on from Microsoft Paint to other programs that might help me make good quality manips especially for gifs. Any recommendations?

Maybe change the title a little bit.

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i hear good things about gimp.

I recommend gimp. Pretty similar to photoshop imo

All right.



Is it user-friendly?

More or less. It'll probably take you a while to figure out certain tools, but unless you're planning to make some really involved manips, I imagine the basic stuff will be plenty. Just don't be afraid to experiment every now and then, and it'll be alright. Personally I'd say figuring out layers, modes and filters should get you pretty far. Plus, we've helpful people here in the forums who propably wouldn't mind handing a little advice from time to time.

As for gif manipulations... As in manipping an already existing gif, or animating a still image with swirly eyes and the like? Frankly neither is my area of expertise, so I'd take the following with a heap of salt. Anyway, now that I've ruined my credibility, if the former, my advice is GIMP should be ok for it, but I can't recommend starting there because it takes a veritable eternity since you'll be working with dozens of layers, so work will be slow especially if you don't know the program a bit.
If the latter, GIMP should still be okay for the purpose, as long as you're not looking for the crispest 60fps spinny things or whatever. If you are, it'll still be a decent middle man for image manipulation, but I imagine you'll want a different program for the animation proper (again, you'll be working with layers upon layers, so being able to actually rotate a spiral or something with lines of code or however them programs work would be infinitely faster afaik).
Anyway, if all that's not to your liking yet, you can do surprisingly much with only a few frames. For reference, <<hypnohub.net/post/show/38...clothes-cynthia-femdom-ha|this>> only has 5 frames total if I recall correctly, but looks pretty decent for what it is, I hope, because I took the time to calculate how the rings expand.

1. "Good" quality is subjective.

2. Whichever program anyone above and below me recommends:

a. it stays a tool to achieve something by it's use, not a magic wand. The skills of the manipper, how much time and efforts he/she/it puts in determines the quality of the manip.

b. The toolset provided by that program could make the manipper work more efficient, but also inefficient when not used in the right way.

c. The manipper likely want to experiment a lot and learn how to work with it. Seek up some recent tutorials. Put 2016/2017/2018 with your search term to not end up with outdated tutorials or tricks.

3. The GIMP is very fine.

4. But when you own a drawing tablet, you will be happier with Krita |=(:3