Look, I know I’m a writeblr, but it seems there’s some curiosity as to how I did that glitch effect on one of the moodboards I posted up, so how’s about a bit of a tutorial for it?
This tutorial will allow you to make a simple glitch animation transition between two images, as shown below! I made this in Photoshop CC (I have... no idea what version), but I’m fairly certain with some changes you could likely figure out a way to do it in some other (free) programs!
This’ll be the example I’ll be using for this tutorial, images sourced from Unsplash.com:
This is a really, really simplified version of a bunch of glitch effect tutorials I’ve seen in the past, and a method I mostly developed just by playing around with photoshop settings!
If you wanted to make it more complex, you could always add on texture overlays, add more frames to the glitch animation, or even add in more images! I’m just not sure how much Tumblr can handle, since it’s usually very limited with how big the gifs you can upload are.
Onto the tutorial! (Put under the cut because it got long with all the images.)
1. Choose your two images! For this gif, I used a random foggy forest photo, and one of a person on a dock!
2. Make your canvas---the best width for gifs on tumblr I’ve found tends to be 540 pixels! Copy and paste in your images onto two separate layers and resize them as you’d like.
3. Since this simpler version only uses two transition glitch frames (one of them repeated), duplicate each of these image layers twice, so you end up having three identical layers for both images.
On one of your duplicated layers, select all of the image [ctrl+a].
4. Here’s the fun part: find the “Channels” tab (usually on the “Layers” window, or find it under the “Window” tab and activate it), click it. Now, highlight only the “Red” channel.
Should look something like that, and be black and white when you look at your canvas.
5. Nudge your selected layer to the left or right a bit. I usually use the [ctrl+shift+left or right arrow keys] command to do this. Make all of the channels visible again to see your creation!
6. Repeat the previous step with all of the duplicated layers (not the layers with the base images), nudging the channels in different directions and different amounts to give a variety!
7. To get those off kilter rectangles, use the “Rectangular Marquee Tool” (which I just call the rectangle select tool) and select a random horizontal rectangle on one of your duplicated layers. Nudge those rectangles to the left or right like you did in step 5. Repeat this step a bunch all over your canvas to get something like the mess below!
8. That looks like a terrible mess. Awesome. Do this same thing to all of your duplicated layers, again varying what directions and amounts of movement you do!
9. ANIMATION TIME. Bring up the “Timeline” window (or “Animation”, or whatever it’s called in your program). “Create Frame Animation”. Make it so you have eight frames to work with by clicking that little square with the folded corner button.
10. Change the times to what I have above if you want to match my gif’s timing, with 3 seconds for the base frames. and 0.08 seconds for the transition glitch frames. Feel free to change this up!
11. Select the second frame, and make your first glitchy layer visible (keeping the base image layer visible to fill in the transparent spots). Do this on your fourth frame, too. On the third frame, make this glitchy layer invisible and make your second glitchy layer visible. Repeat this for your second image and the 5th, 6th and 8th, and 7th frames in that order.
That was confusing. Does the image help? (Ignore my terrible handwriting, I’m doing this with a mouse.)
12. Under “File” find “Save for Web...” and save it! Now you should be able to upload your finished gif to Tumblr using the “Upload Photos” or “Insert Photo” options~
That was longer than I thought it would be, but I hope it was helpful! Feel free to suggest changes to make this easier/better, I’m not experienced with photoshop whatsoever and I mostly made this from just playing around. ^^’ Thanks for reading!
Hey! Rendering myself obsolete. But it's really very easy and automated, and I might as well teach you the easy way right off the bat rather than have you waste your life like I did doing it the hard way.
Things you will need:
The KM Player
Photoshop CS5 and up (but this tutorial is written with CS5)
A video or a clip you want to gif
Step 1: Screencapping
This new window will pop up:
Here are the things you need to change:
Select the folder that you want your screencaps saved to. The default is My Documents>The KMPlayer>Capture.
Select 'Continuously' under 'Numbers to extract'
Choose the size of the screencaps you want to extract. I prefer to work from the original and then change the dimensions of the gif in photoshop so it'll be crisper, but ymmv.
Under 'Frames to extract', select 'in 1sec.' and then put in the number of frames you want to extract per second. The more frames you extract, the smoother the gif, but keep in mind that Tumblr has a file size cap at 1MB, and the more the frames the bigger the gif. 20 is actually a bit too many and I've started going for 15 frames/sec now.
When your scene or moment starts, click 'Start', and then click 'Stop' when it ends. (The Stop button is the Start button after you've clicked it, you'll see.)
At this point I usually go into Adobe Bridge and delete any extraneous frames, but you can also do this in the capture folder.
Step 2: Making the GIF
Open photoshop, go to File>Scripts>Load Files into Stack.
In the new window that pops up, click 'Browse' and look for your capture folder. Select all your screencaps, then click OK, OK. Sit back and let photoshop load that all up for you.
If your animation window is a little shy, go to Window>Animation (or Window>Timeline in CS6) and make sure that's checked.
When it comes out of hiding, click the little drop down control panel on the top right of the box (I forgot to circle it in the picture, sorry!) and select 'Make Frames from Layers'.
If your gif is now playing backwards, just click the control panel again and select 'Reverse Frames'.
Now select all your frames by going back into the control panel and clicking 'Select all frames' (I don't know why ctrl+A doesn't work here but never mind).
Then, click on any of the 0 sec. that you see under each frame, select 'Other...', and in the new window that pops up, enter in how long each frame should run for. If your KM player was set to extract 20 frames/sec I'd put 0.05 or less. If it was set at 15 frames/sec I'd put 0.08 or 0.1.
At this point you pretty much done, except, what's that? Your gif is now almost 2MB? Tumblr will never upload that until its servers are made of magic. So on to step 3.
Step 3: Resizing your GIF
Now there are a lot of ways to resize a gif, but here is my way.
Go to Image>Image Size and in the new window that pops up, there are two things you can change:
Pixel dimensions: The smaller they are, the smaller your gif is, the smaller the file size will be.
Resolution: The lower your resolution, the smaller your file size is, BUT the lower your image quality will be.
Usually if my image is less than 20 frames I will just change the pixel dimensions, but if it is larger I will change the image resolution too.
There is an extra step, but it flows better in the next section, so.
Step 4: Saving your GIF
Go to File>Save for Web & Devices
In this new window that pops up, photoshop displays your choices. In the 4-Up tab, you'll find your original .psd file, which is unusable for some reason, plus three 'optimised' options. To preview, just click the play button on the bottom left, above 'Done'.
The first thing I will usually look at is the size of the top right gif. What! It's still bigger than 1MB? [Creative string of swear words!] It's okay, you can still fix it if it's just a little bit over like it is on mine. Here are your options:
Colours: This dictates how many colours are in your gif. Less colours, less image quality, smaller file size. I personally won't go any lower than 64 for a live action gif.
Dither: If you click on the drop down box, a little slider appears! The lower your dither percentage the crapper your picture looks.
If you're not wholly invested in the dimensions of your gif, you can change them again here.
One last desperate measure is to cancel out of this window and delete a few frames here and there. Usually if you delete every other frame and increase the frame delay no one will notice.
Done? Is it less than 1MB? Good! Click 'Save', do the usual save-y things, upload it and send me an ask to thank me for all I've done to advance your gif-making career.
There's the gif I made while running through the steps of this tutorial. John can't believe how easy it is, either. I bet he's been making gifs the long way this whole time. Just like me.
