So currently I answer to my full first name (which I usually introduce myself with) as well as two nicknames/diminutives plus my last name when people mistake it for a first name. There are two or three other nicknames I've also gone by in the past. I'm perfectly fine with this, or neutral at minimum-- I have a common name and have had to be flexible with how I'm distinguished for my whole life. I also don't feel a deep and fundamental connection of my name with my identity, though I think going by another name entirely would confuse me.
A number of friends have been appalled at me being called names I don't say are my name. Which is really weird to me, although I'd go to battle for anyone else who was getting either deadnamed or called something they didn't want. But this perspective seems surprisingly common!
How do you feel about being called something other than the name you introduce yourself with?
I think it's fun if people give me (non-derogatory) nicknames or shorten my name
I don't care if people call me something else and will answer to it
I'm mildly uncomfortable or annoyed but won't make an issue of it
I HATE being called something else and will always correct people
Okay, we have established I'm on the certified side of freak gifmakers, so I'm dropping my Sharpening action to prove I'm not actually insane. Anymore.
I'm going to take you through making an action in Photoshop for newbies in case you want to make your own or your Photoshop is in a language other than English, because from experience if your program is in Italian, it won't run an English action.
So! Because I'm doing this as a tutorial!
Creating a photoshop action!
Going from this to this, speedrun version!
I picked a bad example, I promise they're different. Spend enough time staring at his eyes and anywhere the light hits and it's a bit more obvious.
So, in my little Intro To Giffing thing, I explained that I use frame animation because I like to micromanage my gifs, and that I sharpen frame-by-frame. By the feedback in the reblog tags, that's an insane thing to be doing. I'll not be dissuaded, but I'll share how to make insanity easy.
Starting with your gif, (details of how to start are in aforementioned post) you're going to use Smart Sharpen. Not regular sharpen.
I mean. You could, if you wanted to, but default sharpen sharpens everything as a blanket; smart sharpen is... smarter? You've got a bit more control, basically.
It's harder to see the difference on mobile, btw. It's much more obvious on desktop. This example is a bad one but I'm too slapdash to go back and find another scene. Regular sharpen actually probably would be fine for this scene, but in busier scenes it'll make ALL the details sharper, and we don't want that.
(Side note, you can absolutely use regular sharpen and then Edit > Fade Sharpen for greater control that way. That's how we used to do it back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. But smart sharpen turns it into a one-step process)
So, photoshop action! I use actions for sharpening, noising and blurring - I'll share mine, but again, this is how to do it for yourself.
If you don't have Actions, go to Window > Actions. It'll appear in your workspace and it looks like this:
So, go ahead and go down to the little folder to create a new set of actions - you can see mine's just the default Set 1, but I've made a new one because actually it turns out I am insane for tutorial purposes.
Once you've made the little folder, click the square with the plus in it and name it whatever you want - presumably, something along the lines of Sharpen.
Upon creating the action, you'll see the little circle button turns red - it's recording! It's going to record everything you do in Photoshop while this is red.
So, with your newly imported and sized and flattened baby gif and with Frame 1 and Layer 1 selected, go up to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen.
You'll get a little pop up box with some settings in it. Play with the settings as much as you like - mine will change occasionally, but broadly speaking, this is roughly where they are.
Amount is for... the amount of sharpening. You can whack it right up to max - sometimes it's fine, sometimes it burns. You're usually safe to have this pretty high.
Radius is the radius of the sharpening. It begins looking horrifying the moment you go over 1.0. At around that point, you'll start seeing finer details actually start to blur in the worst possible way.
Reduce Noise is exactly what it sounds like. There's no harm in having this fairly high, but I don't like to lose too much texture because gifs have a habit of banding if things are too smooth.
I don't change these settings even for each gifset - I usually leave it until it bugs me for one particular set, and then I'll futz around.
So, now you've got your sharpening settings set. That's exciting! Once you hit OK, you'll see your action has updated accordingly
Now, to tedium!
Click on Frame 2 in your Timeline and Layer 2 in your Layers. Then, you can either go back to Filter and the most recent thing you did will be at the very top. It won't give you the settings pop-up again unless you go down to Sharpen > Smart Sharpen again.
Or, marginally quicker: Ctrl + Alt + F.
It should now be kind of obvious why we flatten the frames to layers rather than working with the 'video group' folder in your Layers tab - the action is literally going to read Select layer "Frame 2" every time you run this action, so if your second layer is called TVShow-EP01-04345, the action won't work. The whole purpose of creating this action is so you can use it with every gif you ever make.
So, continue this particular nonsense until you reach the end of your gif. As much as it's a particular pain in the hoop, you probably want a fairly long gif for this one so that you can get all of the tedium out of the way in one go.
That being said, it's not the end of the world if you've only got a short gif for now. We can add to actions, I'll go onto that.
For now: Frame 3, Layer 3, Ctrl + Alt + F. Frame 4, Layer 4, Ctrl + Alt + F. Etc etc ad nauseam.
At a certain point, you'll perhaps once or twice - or a dozen times - mis-click a layer or frame and it's tremendously annoying.
Not to worry! Click the square (Stop) to the left of the red Record button to stop recording your actions. Then click on the step that was wrong and then click the little bin to get rid of it.
Then go back to whatever your most recent (bottom) action is, ensuring you've got it selected. Now click Record again, and resume.
This is also how you can add to an action later on, if you're later creating a longer gif: you'd be able to run the Action, it'd stop when it ran out of actions, then just click Record, click your next frame and layer, and Ctrl Alt F, and on your merry way you go.
Continuing on. Keep going until you've finished your gif, and you're done! Hit Stop, and your first action is complete! Yay!
So, if you've done this for 300 frames, you'll be able to run it on any gif up to 300 frames without issue. If you run it on a gif that's less than 300 frames, you'll get this error message:
Just hit Stop, it's fine: the action's basically telling you "hey, the action can only find Frame 50 and Layer 50, there's no Frame 51!" - it's completed everything up to that point.
If you've done up to like 300 and then you've imported something with 350 frames, you can run the action and it'll just stop at 300. Then, open your actions, press record, and just do the 50 manually. Then your action will henceforth go to 350.
I know there are giffers who use actions for their colouring and other setting up basics, but I do all of those manually - there's not really a limit to what you can use them for. I use it for sharpening, noising and blurring as previously mentioned. I rarely use the blur - usually if I'm making something complex that requires layering, but anyway.
So, all this sort of comes to nothing if you'd rather not make your own, because here's a link to a Drive folder with all three actions in.
Sharpen goes to frame/layer 390, Noise to 294, Blur to 92.
I was aware frame-by-frame sharpening was insane, but I'm giggling at the folks in the reblog tags being like "oh god clearly I don't gif normally" NO!! YOU DO!! I'm the freak, i assure you. It's how i learned so it's how I teach or whatever. Please continue not being insane <3
So, you want to make gifs. Welcome! It's very enjoyable and terribly frustrating in equal measure. Your first gifs are going to be weird, so I thought I'd put together something to explain the super super basics and first causes of weirdness you'll come across in the form of a basic giffing tutorial.
Want to go from this: to this?:
What you'll need to start:
Photoshop or other image-editing software where you can create a video/animation timeline by importing sequential images. Sources say making a general search for a portable version of Photoshop will net you a result upon the high seas.
Video-screen-capturing software. I use KMPlayer which is apparently not recommended, but plenty of people use VLC. I've tried to use VLC a few times and find the frame rate finickier. YMMV. There are a bunch out there.
A video. To screencap. You can use a video of your cat if you like, or if you don't have any "media" to hand.
Patience or stubbornness - either works. At least one is required. I rely on the latter.
I'm not going to make a whole tutorial on screencapping, but very briefly:
Open video player with capture capability. Open your video file. If using KMPlayer, right-click anywhere on the video screen and go to Capture > Frame: Extract, or press Ctrl+G. The options are fairly intuitive but I've included a picture of my settings for our visual learners.
For your first gifs, I recommend using a scene where there's already good lighting - don't go too dark or too bright. These are your first gifs - you can get wacky and frustrated later. Examples below. Pick something very clear, where the background and the subject are very distinct, or at least inoffensive. There's a whole spiral I could go down about too-neutral backgrounds, but that's not this. Not today. Clearly.
Pick your scene. Remember to have picked somewhere with space for your extraction path. Press play, and Start on the Frame Extraction pop up. For this example, I captured about a minute and a half's worth of frames - 1425 1080p images, just over 1GB of images.
I personally have... well. I've got three drives on my PC; the one my screencaps live on is a 2TB.
I have a problem, but that's neither here nor there.
If you're a laptop user or don't have space, you'll likely cap-gif-delete caps-repeat. I still occasinally delete folders to recap things. I do recommend using the highest-size screencaps you can - saves you a ballache later, but you can use smaller frames if your laptop's giving you a look rn.
*
OKAY. So you've got your caps - depending on how much space you have and what your intentions are, you can cap scenes at a time if you're doing a multi-scene gifset, but for these purposes we're just gonna gif this minute and a half or so.
We're going to open our Photoshop or Photoshop equivalent and open a new file. Dimensions I use are 540px x 360px for standard gifs - many of my gifs are taller than that, but that's where we start running into problems with sizes and having to make shorter gifs to compensate. 360px or less (I know many giffers use 320px or 300px as their standard. I'm a size queen. For gifs, anyway.) Pretty much everything else is left at default. You can always make it smaller mid-edit; making it bigger not so much.
540px for one gif the width of a standard tumblr post; 268px if you're doing two columns. Height... whatever you like.
Quick Photoshop Workspace screenshot - this is my workspace. It's what makes sense to me - and I use pretty much everything visible in every gifset barring the default tools on the left.
It's usually bigger than this, I promise.
If setting up for the first time, you definitely want Timeline (bottom) because that's where you frames are gonna be, Layers because weirdly enough that's where your layers are going to be (same same but different from your frames), Adjustments (this is where we play!), History (for oopsies). To edit what windows you have in your workspace, go up to the top navigation bar and click on Window, then pick what you want visible.
To giffing! In your Timeline, click Create Video Timeline, go to the little dropdown arrow next to the film reel icon and Add Media... and then select your caps.
Word of warning: depending on what your system can handle, don't add your whole scene at once. Try just one shot. no cuts between characters for now. This scene I've picked actually starts with a long shot, so I've selected the whole thing. It'll take a minute or two to load in. Photoshop will only accept a max of 500 frames per 'animation' and it will absolutely punish you for it. My PC is used to me importing 300+ frames at a time and still gets mad once I'm like 8 gifs in. Generally speaking, the dimensions of gif we've created, we're probably looking at anything up to about 120 frames, depending on how busy the scene is. I usually import the whole shot and then chop into pieces as needed, so let's do that.
Once it's finished importing, you'll see all of the frames/layers appear in your Layers tab, and your Timeline will have a bunch of stuff in it. Click the three little rectangles to convert to a Frame Animation (I know some folks use the video timeline - it confuses me and my tiny bird brain).
Now, you can see you have a blank frame at the start if your settings were the same as mine - I can technically start a gif with a transparent background, but it's kind of become a ritual for me. Step 1 is to delete the white frame and then step 2 is clicking on your first frame, scrolling aaaall the way to the end, hold down Shift and click your last frame. Then the little dropdown next to the frame delay (5 secs default because apparently people are out there making Powerpoints in Photoshop). If you've used KMPlayer the same way I did, your frame delay is going to be 0.06. Playback within Photoshop is always going to be slightly slower than the real playback, may require some tweaking later if you're using other programs, but let's go with that for now.
Timing set and frames loaded, now's the fun part.
You want to resize your gif and writing this tutorial has made me realise how much I use my keyboard and not actual menus. First, in Layers window, ensure you have Video Group 1 selected (i.e. the whole folder), and then Ctrl + T or Edit > Free Transform. Depending on your resolution, the handles of the images may not be visible. First thing I tend to do is go up to the top bar and change either the vertical or horizontal scale from 100% to 50% or 60% and then adjust the handles from there. These screenshots have an annoying network watermark on them, so you'll typically find that giffers will crop frames rather than include it. In this example, I've cropped it so that there are about 130px or so of the frame cut off. Sometimes it'll be the top of the frame. Sometimes you'll do both.
At this point, I'll use the little buttons at the bottom of the Timeline window to play the whole animation through. This animation has 363 frames so I'll be cutting this up into probably 3-4 gifs minimum. This bit's trial and error, you'll get better at estimating. Rule of thumb is typically you want to try and preserve as much of an action in any given gif so you're not ending gifs mid-word or sentence. Out of these 363 frames, not all of them will make the final outcome. Blow-by blow:
I played this animation until the actor began moving his mouth to speak, so my first slice will be frames 1-130. DON'T DELETE ANYTHING YET. Go to your History window and click the little page with a plus sign on it (shown below) - this is going to duplicate your whole document. It'll open a new file with exactly the same everything and renames that tab the last 'Action' you took. Leave that and go back to your original. Now you can click the next frame, Shift click the last frame, and then click the little bin to delete all of those frames. Bye bye!
Typically what I'll do at that point is go into the new (duplicated) document and delete all of the frames up to 125 or so, and then repeat. Coincidentally, I cut the second gif at 135 also, and so I end up with 3 tabs and 3 much more manageable-sized files.
*Side note, you don't have to cut things up, but I find it so much easier to navigate. I used to just create 300+ frames gifs but things tended to get wonky quickly. I give myself a few frame margin when chopping so I've got room to play.
So! Back to Untitled-3!
Happy with the play and the crop of things, go to the hamburger menu on the Timeline window at the far right and click Flatten Frames Into Layers. This will now crop everything and disappear the original frames (they're still accessible at the bottom of your Layers, but I don't recommend doing anything with them. Invisible, they take up no space.) You'll now have neatly named layers rather than all those file names.
First thing I tend to do with any gif is use Sharpen - in this case, Smart Sharpen, So, go up to your navigation menu and go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. My settings tend to vary, but in this case I didn't want to lose all of Fourth's glorious little freckles, so I binned 'Reduce Noise'. Depending on what you're using, play a little with the noise reduction and amount settings. I don't recommend doing anything wild with the radius. Bump it up and see why.
I have a Photoshop Action that sharpens every frame for me, because once upon a time I made a giant gif and tediously sharpened each frame manually so I'd never have to do it again - I can do an action tutorial another day, it's really easy, but for now... hopefully you haven't picked a shot with as many frames as me. Once you've sharpened the frame 1 (Timeline)/layer 1 (Layers), go ahead and click on frame 2 and layer 2. Alt + Ctrl + F will use the same Smart Sharpen settings. Then onto frame 3 and layer 3 and repeat. Keep repeating 'til you run out of road.
(NB. you don't have to sharpen your gif, but it does make things look a lot more polished at the end)
I am told this is easier when you're using the video timeline. I refuse to believe this because I'm old and set in my ways (Y)
Once all sharp, we begin to play! Keeping your final layer selected in Layers, select your first frame in Timeline. First thing I do is play a little with the depth of things - brightness, contrast and levels. Sometimes there'll be a curve layer flung in for fun, but I'm sticking with the basics for now. Brightness and contrast is the first little icon in your Adjustments panel - it looks like a half blacked out sun.
This is already a pretty light image, but I'm going to boost both brightness and contrast a little. These can be adjusted later if we end up overboard... or underboard?
Back in Adjustments panel, Levels is the next button along from the last one. It looks like a spiky graph. I usually pull both dark and light ends in a bit, increasing the contrast further and narrowing the number of colour variants going on. Mid value tends to stay untouched. Mostly.
Now, this is perfectly acceptable as-is, but I'm going to play a little with the colour balance and see if I can give the skintones a little more warmth to pull them out of the background, just a tiny bit. This is where my beloved and much-abused Colour Balance adjustment comes in.
So, back to your Adjustments panel, por fa! And this time we're going for Colour Balance. Which, funny enough, looks like a pair of scales. It's second in on the row below the first two I talked about.
I usually emphasise red and/or blue in shadows, I just like how it looks. Typically, I'll then use very slight cyan as a highlight, but I used red and blue again here because it's a warm scene and I wanted it to stay warm. Midtones are very very tiny adjustments because I'd taken too much yellow out of the skintone by de-greening him and I do try not to literally whitewash people lol.
For all intents and purposes, we're done! I intended this to be an extremely "getting into giffing/intro to using adjustments" thing and it sort of... grew. I'll typically do a few other things - selective colour is my most and also least favourite thing in the world, occasionally I'll slap on a gradient or colour fill layer or play with saturation. I also have a love/hate relationship with vibrance and curves.
I'll fire on my watermark, which is just a text layer overtop everything, either white text set to 10-30% opacity with a faint drop shadow, or white text 100% opacity set to soft light or overlay with a faint drop shadow.
Now, how do we show people your work? We export! For web! And inevitably cry!
To File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy)
Jumpscare in 3... 2...
WAS IST DAS.
Handily for me, the most likely culprit here is the fact this gif is 130 frames long because most of the colours here are in tact, it's just the dark colours that are choosing violence, which just tells me there's too much for Photoshop to choose from and it's garbage at prioritising.
In this case, I just went back to the gif and lopped off 47 frames, and:
Ah, much more better. It's still not perfect, but nothing's ever gonna be perfect.
The other side of this preview panel is where you can play your gif and it'll play at the speed it'll show once you've uploaded it. You can cancel out of this and go and adjust your frame delay if needs be. It also shows you a panel of all 256 colours it's prioritised using. Sometimes you'll stare at that panel going "Why have you prioritised 250 shades of green and only one dark brown and 5 skin tones? Why. Why/??" and. idk. There are mysteries in this world that no one knows the answer to, and no one ever will.
RESULT:
Look what we did! Yaaaaay!
This has been a crash course in giffing. There's more to be done to actually create a full gifset, which is mainly just drag and dropping your adjustment layers over to the other tabs we created earlier.
My biggest piece of advice is just... go nuts. Start something basic but then just... click stuff. Make weird adjustments. It's just a gif, at the end of the day - starting over is terror-inducing when you've had something open all day or you've got a lot of moving parts or individual elements, but for the basics? Dr. Pepper it. What's the worst that can happen?
Nobody asked for this but I hope it's interesting for someone. I hope it explains things in excruciating detail, at least.
If this helps in any way, please feel free to assault me with your gifs - I'd love to see how you go. Or if you get stuck, by all means give me a shout. I've been using Photoshop for over half my life, it'd be nice to have a use for all the absurd knowledge I've accrued.
