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!
