uh hi. it's me again. I'm really sorry to bother you but how are able to make your gifs so clean and clear? ive been a gif creator for years and now recently ive been having a lot of trouble with pixels.
Never a bother! I’m always happy to help when and where I can.
I briefly touched on all of this in my FAQ but I really, truly do live by these steps when I gif, so I feel it bears repeating here as well, and with a little more detail.
Always, always work with HD footage. 4K (2160p) isn’t necessary, but I would say that 1080p definitely is. I think you can get away with giffing 720p if you absolutely need to, but the bigger your gif, the more necessary it becomes to work with footage that’s both high quality and high definition. Screen recording is fine—it’s something I used to do myself, though I’ve since stepped away from it—but you get the very most out of any given footage by clipping videos directly from a download or through screencapping.
Be sure to size your gifs correctly. It’s not as noticeable on mobile/the app, maybe, but on desktop under-sizing or over-sizing will take away from the quality of the gif. Your gifs might look blurry, pixelated, extra grainy, or even a combination of those things. For reference, here are the official sizes for photosets:
Sharpening is key. I’d even go a step farther and call it more important than sizing; sizing alone doesn’t get you very far in the “crisp and clear” department, though I’d caution that there is such a thing as oversharpening. Personally, I prefer to add Gaussian Blur to soften things up, but below are all the different methods of sharpening.
(You can find my sharpening settings and process here.)
Use the best possible Save for Web settings. I mean “best” in the most general sense of settings that are optimal, but also best suited for you and your gifs specifically. Like most other things, some of it comes down to personal preference: selective vs adaptive, pattern vs diffusion, which to pair together.
Where Pattern places pixels in a grid, Diffusion results in an effect that’s more randomized. And as per the Adobe site:
[Selective] creates a color table that favors broad areas of color and the preservation of web colors. This color table usually produces images with the greatest color integrity.
[Adaptive] creates a custom color table by sampling colors from the spectrum appearing most commonly in the image. For example, an image with only shades of green and blue produces a color table made primarily of greens and blues. Most images concentrate colors in particular areas of the spectrum.
Examples of each different setting under the cut.
The differences between Selective and Adaptive can range from minor to major, so while the differences here are, admittedly, pretty tame, that won’t always be the case. Because of how colors are processed, it’s something you’ll find to be dependent on a particular scene/gif. How light or dark it is, how many colors there are, how many shades of those colors exist within the gif, et cetera.
I myself favor Adaptive + Pattern, but will go back to Selective + Pattern if a gif calls for it—sticking with Pattern because I feel it produces the “cleanest” results. But I know loads of gifmakers whose preference is Diffusion, and others yet who will regularly switch between the two, so there’s no real “right” or “wrong” here, so long as the rest of your settings match up with these ones, I think:
I’ve been asked to make a gifing and colouring tutorial by several people this week. I do have a gif-making tutorial, but I’d made that tutorial over a year ago, and I’d like to think my gifs have improved since then.
I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS6 (though CS5 is fine as well, as they’re very similar) and VLC media player.Â
Please like or reblog if you find this tutorial useful or intend to use it! And feedback is always appreciated.
I’m going to be explaining the way that I find easiest to gif and also, the way that doesn’t make my computer lag like the other ways do. I’m going to be going into a lot of detail so this is going to be really long! I’ve also never seen a tutorial on how to make gifs the way that I do so that’s one of the main reasons I’m making this. Please like/reblog if you find this useful because this literally took me two hours to make.Â
I have gotten many, many asks before about how I gif and I finally decided to make a tutorial. This is going to be very long, very image heavy and with a lot of details and examples. I mean it, I’m going through every, single aspect of giffing that I can possibly think of. From start to finish. And please read the disclaimer at the very start.
* I use a macbook pro but this should probably work on windows too!
I hate doing this but if this helped and you want to, please consider donating to my ko-fi or if you want, commission a theme or page from me at @amaanat <3
as requested! this is a super super detailed tutorial for the a-z of gifmaking basics, starting from getting photoshop & downloading hq movies/videos alll the way to tagging & scheduling your gifsets on tumblr for max interaction. if you’ve wanted to get into gifmaking but feel intimidated or you don’t know where to start, this is the tutorial for you!!! making gifs might seem overwhelming at first, but with practice, it’s quite easy to get the basics down. for reference, this post is up to date as of nov. 2020. please rb if this helps!
Hello, everyone! Since I reached a milestone (and because of the lack of updated gaming gif tutorials), I’ve decided to make this and share my process on how I make gaming gifs. Note that this applies to live action gifs too! But not anime/cartoon gifs. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me. I’ve opened up my DMs for everyone. I’m adding screenshots too to make it easier to understand so this is gonna be image-heavy.
What you will need:
Photoshop CC (I’m using Photoshop CC 2017)
KMPlayer (https://kmplayer.en.softonic.com/) — this is optional
Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr/)
[Basic Gaming GIF Tutorial here]
Update: I’ve included two other methods to importing frames/videos in photoshop and have added more information in timing gaming gifs.
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