#*tutorial:basics

[thyfairygothmother]

hi dumb question but how do you put a frame around your font in gifs?

first of all: there are no dumb questions when it comes to editing, making gifs and photoshop in general. we’ve all started somewhere ✌🏻 so today i am going to show you how i achieved the above effect ( used in this and this gifset)

Here’s what you’ll need!● Photoshop (I’m using Photoshop CS6)● Basic knowledge on making gifs● Please like/reblog if this post helped you in any way!● If anything is unclear, don’t hesitate to ask● Click ‘read more’ to view this tutorial

Step 1:choose a scene you want to gif or a picture you want to edit. make your screencaps if you’re going for a gif (i recommend KM Player for this!) import them into photoshop, crop and sharpen your layers like you would normally do and apply a coloring of your liking. this should leave you with something that looks like this

Step 2:decide where your text is going to be and place those layers above the scene you’re gifing and it’s coloring. this leaves you with something like this 

Step 3:now we’re getting to the actual tutorial ✨ the first thing we want to do is to select the rectangle tool on the left, which looks like this

if you’re not seeing a rectangle, just right click on the symbol and choose the first option. now that we’ve selected this symbol we get a nice little options bar at the top. 

you’re free to experiment and go wild with these options, but the ones that i usually go for are these

now you’re free to just drag and drop your rectangle under your text layers, which should leave you with something that looks like this

Step 4:now we’re getting to the ‘see-through’ part and we’ll also add a nice border to our rectangle. so the next thing we want to do is to select our rectangle and start playing around with the opacity of the layer

i usually choose something near 40% of opacity, which looks like this

but now you can barely see our frame, so let’s get a border around that! to do this please select the add a layer style symbol, which is this little fx symbol at the bottom right and make sure your rectangle is still selected

and select ‘stroke’

again, you’re free to experiment with the options, but these are my settings

AND THIS IS IT! ❤️

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and please like/reblog if it was helpful in any way  💜✨

[thyfairygothmother]

What do you do to avoid quality loss when you save your GIFs for web? I always get a quality reduction because I'm making GIFs from a 1080p video and saving to a GIF with only 256 colors. Is there some amazing settings in save for web that keeps that quality loss to a minimum?

unfortunately there’s not much you can do to avoid quality loss when it comes to gifs, but if you follow these tips the quality loss should definitely be kept to a minimum   ✌🏻

1. always use high quality videos. 1080p is the holy grail, but you should be fine with 720p, too. 2. make sure you choose the right dimensions for your gif. if you use the wrong dimensions your gifs will look blurry when you’re uploading them to tumblr.3. when it comes to screencapping, always try to extract every frame - please keep in mind that this might not work when you’re going for a larger gif. also be careful when you’re setting the time delay of your screencaps in photoshop. if they’re moving too slowly, the gif is more likely to look grainy or slightly pixelated.4. always sharpen your gifs, but be careful when you do so. too much sharpening will make your gifs look grainy again, so experiment around till you’re happy with the result.5. coloring gifs is usually fun, but it can also be quite painful. sometimes certain layers (especially selective colour and colour balance) when used at an extreme, can lower the quality of the gif. so don’t be afraid to disregard them or change their opacity. 6. make sure that these are your settings when saving for web: