hello! ive gotten a few asks about how i make gifs from a still image so i figured i’d share my secrets and try my hand at a tutorial! i’ve tried to make this accessible for everybody regardless of their photoshop skills but ofc if you have any questions or get stuck i’m always just an ask away!
edit: i’ve recently added a second, much less time-consuming tutorial here!
what you’ll be making:
what you’ll need:
—a still image of your choice
—photoshop (i used cc but as long as it’s got timeline you should be fine)
—please like/reblog if you found this useful!
please note: this tutorial is pretty image heavy!
okay so first we start off by finding an image we want to turn into a gif. for the purpose of this tutorial i used this one:
notice how it’s a lot bigger than the end result? that’s on purpose! you want some wiggle room!
so you’re gonna open photoshop and go straight to image > canvas size and then change your canvas size to whatever you want. tumblr’s image dimensions can be found here & i chose to make my gif 268 x 140.
then, paste your image onto the canvas & resize it using the scale function.
note: you must leave some extra room so the image can move! like this:
once you’ve got it to the size you want, jump over to the layers and duplicate layer 1. and then do it again. and again. do it a lot. (i normally recommend having at least 100 duplicate layers because you won't be able to add any extra later on so better to have too many than not enough!
once you’ve got all your layers, delete the white background layer and then click the create video timeline button
which should bring us to this:
then, click the three little boxes on the bottom left
this will turn your video timeline into a single frame:
next, click this button on the right side of the timeline and then click make frames from layers
now you should have as many frames as you do layers:
this isn’t required but normally at this point i’ll delete the original layer & the frame that says ‘5 secs’ so i’ve only got the copies. this just makes it easier to keep count of how many times you need to move the frames/layers.
this is the annoying part: you need to adjust every single layer/frame individually, pixel by pixel, to actually turn it into a moving gif. click on the layer & the matching frame and shift it up using the top arrow button on your keyboard. important: you must highlight both the layer and the frame or it won't move correctly.
so i’ll shift the first layer up by one pixel, then the second layer (layer copy 2) by two pixels, then the next (layer copy 3) by three pixels, etc, etc.
now i ended up doing this for a total of 64 frames but obviously you can do it for however many frames you like! once you’ve gotten to the end of your image or have reached your desired result, just delete the remaining frames/layers because you don’t need them.
this is what you should have:
i was happy with the number of frames i had at this point but i decided that i preferred it going the other direction because it flowed better so i simply clicked the timeline menu button on the top right of the timeline
and clicked reverse frames which gave me this:
(to avoid needing to reverse the frames i could’ve used the same process but just used the down arrow on my keyboard instead of the up arrow & just shifted them downwards instead of upward. this applies for any direction really: if you want it to move sideways instead of up/down just use the left or right keys!)
then, i edited it the same way i would any other gif!
select all your frames in the timeline and change the frame delay (i usually set it to 0.05) and then click this little bugger again:
then go and select all your layers and then right-click (control + click for mac users) and choose convert to smart object
from there you can sharpen (i used this action) and colour (i used this psd) the gif as you normally would!
which brings us to the end result which looks like this:
export > save for web
and that’s it! you’re done!
i really hope this helped?? it’s my first tutorial so if you have any questions or need clarification on something please feel free to send me an ask!
hello! thank you so much to everybody who’s recently liked/reblogged my last tutorial and a massive thank you to the kind anon who sent me the tip on tweening which led me to this (note: this tutorial is not on how to tween but it was such a good way of doing things that i had to share this version with everybody as well bc it’ll save you all a lot of time!)
i’ve tried to make this accessible for everybody regardless of their photoshop skills but ofc if you have any questions or get stuck i’m always just an ask away!
what you’ll be making:
what you’ll need:
—a still image of your choice
—photoshop (i used cc but as long as it’s got timeline you should be fine)
—please like/reblog if you found this useful!
please note: this tutorial is pretty image heavy!
okay so first we start off by finding an image we want to turn into a gif. for the purpose of this tutorial i used this one:
notice how it’s a lot bigger than the end result? that’s on purpose! you want some wiggle room!
so you’re gonna open photoshop and go straight to image > canvas size and then change your canvas size to whatever you want. tumblr’s image dimensions can be found here & i chose to make my gif 268 x 140.
then, paste your image onto the canvas & resize it using the scale function.
note: you must leave some extra room so the image can move!
now this is where the tutorial differs from my last version: you’re gonna go straight to the create video timeline button & click it
which should bring us to this:
then, go back to your layer and right-click on it (control + click for mac) and choose convert to smart object
once that’s done, pop back over to your timeline and click the down arrow next to where it says layer 1 which will give you a little pop-down menu of three options (transform, opacity, style)
note: if you don’t convert your layer to a smart object, the transform option won't show up so make sure you do that because that’s what we’ll be using!
next, click the circle/clock icon next to the transform option which will give us a little yellow diamond
now using the little blue grabber at the top of the red line, you’ll drag that red line across your timeline to whatever length of time you want (don’t worry, this part doesn't need to be exact)
then hit command + t (ctrl + t for windows) which will select your whole layer
using the arrow buttons, i’m then going to shift my image up until i reach the bottom of my image which will look like this:
now in this section, you can go in any direction; up, down, sideways, etc. you can also zoom your image in if you’d prefer to have a gif that zooms in rather than simply have one that moves in one direction. to zoom, just click on one of the white dots in the corner of the blue outline & scale it!
when you’re happy, click return/enter and you should now have a little grey diamond appear:
this will be the end of your animation! to test it, drag your red line back to the beginning of your animation and press the space bar & you should see a little movie of your animation moving in the direction you want (or zooming in if that’s what you decided to do)
now you just gotta delete the extra space on the timeline! go to the end of your timeline animation and hover your mouse over the end until it turns into this funky little symbol:
then just click + drag the end of the animation in until you get to your little grey diamond
now i haven’t figured out any other way to do this so go to file > export > save for web like you would normally do when saving a gif & then just reopen the file in photoshop which you might notice will have a blank layer/frame at the beginning. just delete those!
now this is what we should be working with:
which is still a bit too fast imo so i just selected all my frames in the timeline and changed the frame delay (i usually set it to 0.05) which brought me to this:
next, click this little bugger:
and then go and select all your layers and then right-click (control + click for mac users) and choose convert to smart object
from there you can sharpen (i used this action) and colour (i used this psd) the gif as you normally would!
which brings us to the end result which looks like this:
export > save for web
and that’s it! you’re done!
i really hope this helped?? honestly this way is sooooo much easier than my original tutorial so a massive thank you again to the kind anon who pointed me in this direction! you’re a lifesaver!
