#giffing guide

[maxtism]

hi dear anon!! 🥰💕 of course, i will do my best to explain!! 🙂‍↕️🌈 i will show you how i go from raw footage (gif one) to my very bright gifs (gif two) to the best of my abilities ☀️🌸🌷

so, this guide kind of assumes you are already familiar with the basics of ps (clipping, resizing, etc) — if you aren’t it would be best to look at some guides here on tumblr!! 🙂‍↕️ those helped me out a ton when i first started giffing in 2023 🫶🫶🌷🌷 besides that, my ps is in dutch so i sincerely apologise for that 😭😭😭 i will do my best to tl 💪 i also want to make it very clear that i do not claim to be particularly experienced at this hahaha it is very much a hobby for me!! 😄

i will take you through my process of making a ‘normal’ gif!! if you want to make a (what i call) pink gif, this is still the starting point — i just mess around with filters afterwards kfhskshsj 🌷🌷🌸🌸💕💕🎀🎀

one more thing before i get started: it all comes down to just ‘mess around and see what looks good’ at the end of the day fishkshsj 😭😭😭 some footage is inherently more difficult to gif than others, and i usually add a bunch of layers at the end of this basic process to achieve my goal 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️ its a process!!!

1. lets start with the raw footage:

2. curves

as you can see, its a bit dull and the colors feel ‘off’. what i first do is add two curves layers: one of which is used to make the gif brighter (upper pipette), and the other is used to add more contrast to the gif (bottom pipette):

3. liveliness

when that’s done, i add a layer thats literally tled as ‘liveliness’ from dutch to english (i’m so sorry if you cannot find it 😭), and turn that up a wholeeeee lot lol here is where the magic happens:

4. color balance

then, i add a color balance layer below the liveliness layer. in the past, i have done this the other way around, but by already upping the liveliness before this step i can see much clearer what colors dominate/what color correcting is appropriate 🙂‍↕️

as you may have realised, i usually tend to make my gifs VERY blue lol so just play around with the settings and see what you like personally!! 😄🌈 there is no right or wrong really and these things come with experience jfhsjshsj

5. hue/saturation

i add a layer above the liveliness layer and mess around with the colors a bit more. in general, i use the pipette to make skin more/less bright (obviously be careful not to white wash anyone PLEASE i only use this to reduce redness 😭😭😭) and i use it to make the background less blue (i try) so there is a bigger contrast w max’s suit and the bg (but i’m not really amazing at that)

6. selective color

if half of the magic happens at the liveliness layer, the other half happens here. it is a little difficult to explain exactly what i do, but i usually end up decreasing the yellow in the blue layer and upping the magenta/cyan for a more blue result 😄🪽 just mess around and see what happens!!!

7. gradient map 1

i then add a black-white gradient map, reverse it, put it on soft light mode and reduce it to 70% with 30% ‘filling’. what this basically does is reduce contrast and make the gif ‘feel lighter’ imo

8. gradient map 2

because i don’t want to lose all the contrast, i add another gradient map, don’t reverse it this time, put it on soft light and dim it to about 20%, but this greatly differs per gif 🙂‍↕️

9. gradient map 3

for the extra pop of color i so very much adore, i add a final gradient map which is rainbow colored!!!! then, i put it on ‘saturation’ and dim it to about 10% (lower for some gifs) 🌈🌈🌈 you can really see the pop of color it creates!!!!

10. brightness/contrast

finally, i add a brightness/contrast layer, put it on ‘bleach’ mode, and dim it to 20-60% depending on the gif. this makes the gif much brighter 😄😄🪽🪽🪽🌸🌸

11. final touches & exporting

as you can see, i added a few more layers and played around with my settings a bunch to achieve the final gif, using the steps above as my basis 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🌈🌈🌷🌷 again, it really just comes down to ‘mess around a bunch till it looks good’ jdjajshka 😭😭😭

these are the export options i use!!! feel free to copy LOL 😛 don’t forget gifs need to be under 10mb for tumblr!!! i got super lucky w this one 😭😭💪💪

aaaand there you have it!!! your gifs are done 😄😄😄💕💕 now you can upload them or do whatever you want w them 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

giffing is a skill, and i often find myself finetuning for hours if i allow myself fkdhskjd for example these gifs are a bit too purple for my taste, but thats a learning experience!! most important thing is to have fun 🥰🥰🥰

i hope this guide somewhat helped!!!! 🫶🫶🫶 if anyone ever uses this guide to make gifs pls lmk id absolutely love to see them 💕💕💕

[wonwooridul]

I always wanted to make a giffing + colouring tutorial.

So, Welcome to my long and somewhat helpful guide that no one asked for <3

For starters, i use VaporSynth (links for installation compiled by @soonhoonsol <hi bestie3 which has a guide ). Photoshop 2021 version for making the gif and colouring it . Install PS from this site. it’s free and cracked ver ;)

STEP 1 : the video for giffing

i don’t need .ts files cause my gifs can be made with normal .mp4 file which i either download from a 4k downloader or screen record on my laptop (windows key + alt + R), which is actually pretty convenient since it allows you to record even 4K resolution videos with perfect quality. the only downside it that, it take a lot more space than a normal downloaded video. but you can always delete the videos after you’re done giffing.

STEP 2: using VS to make & sharpen your gif

(i will be giffing and colouring Dongmyeong from ONEWE since their mv's are very monotonous but not fully black and white. We need to have some colours present in the video/gif so that we have some colours to manipulate in the first place.)

After you decide what part you want to gif, note down the timestamps. After installing and setting up VS, you’ll have a .bat file on which you have to drag your .ts or .mp4 file which will open a timestamp window which looks like this :

And will open a resizing tab in your default search engine after you press enter after entering the timestamp and gif duration. Use settings: qtgmc 60p cause it saves it at a better quality and has 60 frames per second so it’s smoother and small gif size.

Simultaneously, a vapousynth script will open. Remove whatever there is from line #17 to #26. paste what you copied from the resizer on line #17. Enter your sharpening settings on line #24 and your denoise settings on line #22. After entering your numbers, remove the # before cache size command so it doesn’t hang your laptop. Mine does when I don’t do that. Save that setting, file > save script. Then you won’t have to remove it everytime you make a gif. Your final script before encoding should look like this (refer to the script in the 3rd photo of the collage):

after that, follow these steps:

i personally like to use PNG SEQUENCE for my gifs cause one, it’s compatible; two, the quality of the gif turns out good. For me, normal gif output is pretty dithered which i don’t like.

you can close the script after you see green bar in encode window that says '100%. video has finished encoding'

STEP 3: accessing your output png frames / gif

after you close all the vs .html windows, you’ll find your gif/png fames under your VaporSynth folder that you have extracted under VapourSynth64Portable(200722)> gifs>output. i have separate folder where i cut and paste these frames so that they’re easily accessible later.

imp!!!(this may only be my problem): either rename or change the location of the output PNGs before you start with a new one. if not, they will get replaced with the new one since vs automatic name system is 'output00001' for each new batch of encode. Same goes if you decide to encode to gif cause it will be saved as 'output' and be replaced by new one.

after you're done with accessing your output PNGs, close all the windows and repeat the same for a new set of PNGs for another gif.

STEP 4: loading your frames into Photoshop

if you have made an output gif, then you can just open it. File > Open and select all from where you saved it and it’ll load in frames.

after you’ve opened your PS, make sure your Timeline mode is on (window > timeline) then go to File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack. click Browse and it’ll open your file manager; select where you’ve pasted your output frames. select them all and press enter, let them load and press okay.

After PS is done loading your frames, it’ll look something like this. After that click create frame animation. It’s show only one frame so you have to click this ≡ symbol on the top right of the timeline. Then click Create Frames from layers and it’ll make all frames. Then click ≡ again and click “reverse frames” because ps loads frames in reverse so you have to un-reverse it.

then click bottom left Switch to Video Timeline.

Then select all your layers from the side panel and convert it into a smart object so that you can sharpen it and add other filters.

STEP 5: Colouring. Turning dull/monotone gifs into natural colour (not total b&w gifs)

again, we need to have some colour in the gif that we can manipulate. this tutorial won’t be helpful for b&w gifs.

without colouring you can see some faint reds and blues there.

Here’s the colouring tutorial !

A TIP : If you want to dull out a certain colour, use the opposite colour of it. For example of red you can use green/cyan. For blue you can use orange.

A TIP: If you want to add more colour to the skin, you can use gradient map (taught by @scoupsy <33) esp for pale skin. here is her awesome tutorial !

A TIP: direct output gif from vs will be faster than a png sequence created gif. png sequence loads in 0.02 sec delay between each frame but that you can change by selecting all frames in timeline and right clicking them and change it to “no delay”

idk why there are bigass pixels on the monotonous gifs on mobile, ignore that pls

i read tags on my cc game and saw many of you wondered how i coloured this, so:

adjustments layers used for this:

Brightness / Contrast

Vibrance / Saturation

Colour Balance

Photo Filter (Sepia)

Selective Colour 1 (red, blue, magenta, white, neutrals, blacks)

Selective Colour 2 ( red, yellow, green)

Curves

i hope this tutorial was little helpful ! for any problem, you can always reach out to me <3 i tried my best with all the things i know about giffing.