just wanted to share an update on my past gif actions since i no longer use that anymore. there a bunch of actions out there but if anyone is curious on my process <3
action includes:
load files fast: open with image sequence with frame rate delay of 25 (you'll need to configure this to your own folder)
6 sharpening actions
brighten: duplicates smart object sets the mode to "screen" i use these for dark scenes
frame delay: convert layers in video timeline to frame layers in frame animation and sets frame delay to 0.04
convert to video timeline: layers in frame animation are put into a smart object in video timeline
text: sets a drop shadow and stroke setting to text
download here // crop presets // psd
+small tutorial w/ video under
Load Files Fast action opens up a folder where you put your own screencaps in and loads the caps in PS and makes it into a smart object. You will need to configure this yourself since it uses my own folder. Click on Load Files Fast, select "Record" button and then choose File > Open, navigate to the folder that you use to store your screencaps, select the first cap, click on the "Image Sequence" option on the bottom right of the dialog box and then click "Open". It will then ask you to specify the frame rate, I use 25, then click OK. Then you click on the "Stop" button and your action is saved. [video on how here]
After it is put into a Smart Object, I use one of my crop presets I've made. To load them into Photoshop, click on the down arrow next to the crop bottom, click Load Tool Preset and select my preset.
Then I choose a sharpening I want to use. I'm either use 'high pass' or the 'sharper w/o grain' one.
OPTIONAL - Brighten action, brightens the scene using 'Screen' mode. I use these for really dark scenes.
After that I color the gif and add text if needed.
If I want to change the frame delay, I use the 'frame delay' action and set my delay to 0.04 and then save the gif!
If you do decided to use the frame delay action, you won't be able to change the coloring and text once its in frame animation. So you can decide to do your coloring/text after you use this action so you don't have to go back and forth if you decide you want to change your coloring or text.
BIOGRAPIYA ( TEMP. ) | a photoshop template made specifically for your muses discord biographies . but feel free to use it however you'd like ! just make sure you have the font poppins installed & you're knowledgable on clipping masks . i made this entire template from scratch so everything is customizable . as always , a like + reblog would be greatly appreciated ♡ i also follow the hashtag #naileadevoras & #mentamoon if you'd like to show me your creations using my content . thank you ! click the source link to download this psd .
font pack #013: NEW PRETTY FONTS
- no need to credit, theyre from dafont.
- every like/reblog is appreciated.
- rose bella | milk cake | orchidea couture | maose | vintage binary | simplefont | foremost | mamboe
sofia & remy asked for this tutorial so here it is :)
note: i pay for photoshop and currently own the most recently released version of april 2025 - some things might be different if you're working on earlier versions of photoshop
i've made several gifsets (x, x, x, x) where i've isolated the gif subject so i can change the background into a bright, colorful background or into b&w backgrounds - in this tutorial i'll explain how i do that :)
in this tutorial we'll be going from this:
to this:
putting the tutorial under a read more!
step 1 — open your gif
i usually tend to make my gif beforehand, fully colored and sharpened and everything else, and save it before reopening it (as a gif) in photoshop cause i find it's the easiest way!
you'll have to work in frames mode when isolating the background color (because as said, you'll have to do this frame by frame) and it's important to always have the same frame and layer selected, otherwise you might run into some issues
for the purpose of this tutorial my premade gif (eddie<333) has not been colored, only sharpened
step 2 — selecting your subject
next up we're going to select our subject by going to the select category up top and clicking subject
↓ you'll now have a marching ants line around your subject ↓
sometimes photoshop will be silly and select either too much or too little, and you'll have to manually make sure (for every frame) that your subject is correctly selected - but i'll get back to that later!
step 3 — adding a solid color (/gradient color) layer mask
once you have your subject selected the way you want it, we're going to add a solid color (or gradient color) layer mask by clicking this half filled circle icon in your layers tab - from here on out you can choose whether you want to add a solid color or gradient (for this tutorial - we'll go with a solid color)
photoshop will ask you to pick a color (or gradient) so just go ahead and pick whatever color you wish to make your background! the lighter your color the brighter your background, and the darker your color the duller your background (for b&w backgrounds you can use black or white, it makes no difference) - once you're happy with your color, just press ok :)
step 4 — create a clipping mask
this might seem like nothing, but is actually an important step in the process! you want to make sure that the color fill layer you just created is clipped to the corresponding frame like so:
you can do this by pressing cmd/ctrl + alt + g or clicking right on your color fill layer and selecting create clipping mask
by clipping your color fill layer to the corresponding gif layer, you avoid this happening:
the color fill layer for the last gif layer has been applied on all gif layers before that, which will make it so that your subject will move in and out of the colored background and makes your gif look silly ↓
obviously this is what we want to avoid so clipping your color fill layer to your gif layer is an essential step!
step 5 — invert the layer mask of your color fill layer
next up we're going to select the layer mask and invert it by pressing cmd/ctrl + i
this way we go from this
to this
step 6 — changing the blend mode of your color fill layer
the final step (!) is changing the blend mode of your color fill layer - i tend to just use the blend mode color on most of these as this mode tends to give the brightest results but you can definitely mess around and see what you prefer :)
(for this set i actually put the blend mode to soft light to create a duller background, for a gradient background just follow the exact same process but in step 3 choose gradient instead of solid color)
and you're done! now you only have to repeat this process for every. single. gif. frame. :)
and that's all there is to it really, so happy creating <3 see more tips/comments below and if you have questions, my askbox is always open!
tips / comments
1.- record this entire process into an action (tutorial on how to create actions) – this way you'll only have to select the correct frame/layer combo before pressing play and letting photoshop do the work for you! i made two general actions;
bw with subject select: use this action when photoshop can select your subject without issues!
bw without subject select: use this action when you need to manually edit the selection of your subject! (see 2.-)
feel free to download and use these actions! they will turn your background b&w - you can change the background color by clicking this square;
sofia @sadgayeddie made an action to select next frame + layer so you don't have to move your cursor around as often and graciously allowed me to share it <3 you can find it here
2.- (circling back to step 2) make sure photoshop correctly selects your subject – when using the select subject feature, photoshop may fuck up the selection of your subject, as such ↓
i don't want the lady in the background included in my subject - you'll have to use the quick selection tool to manually unselect whatever you don't want in your subject and/or manually select what you do want in your subject
from personal experience i know photoshop tends to fuck up with;
hair (especially when it moves around a lot)
blurry subject (eg eddie dancing in 8x06)
one or more colors in your subject being too close to the background color(s) (such as bobby's suit in this example)
hands (the smaller the hands, the more photoshop makes a mess)
this is what the subject looks like without the lady in the back selected:
it's a bit more work if you have to edit the subject selection for every frame (and you might make small mistakes), but it's worth it! we want the gif looking like this in the end (sneak peek for my bobby set!!)
Hello! As promised, an expanded gif tutorial. I made one on my old blog (argentinagp) but it was rushed because I was answering an ask, so here is a bigger one. You can reblog, of course, and ask any clarifications or literally ask for help! I also highly recommend following @usergif, they have soooo many cool tutorials done by them and reblogged!
GETTING THE VIDEO
SHARPENING
COLORING
EXPORTING
1: Getting the video -> one of the most tedious parts if i may say so myself is getting the vid. But there is two main things i use.
The first one is for youtube videos: 4kdownloader. I've tried them all. The online ones, the none online ones. But this one is the best. And for free up to 10 downloads a day! You can download in any quality you want it is very fast.
Another program I use is obs. This is basically the program for streamers, but it screen records too, in perfect quality! With firefox you can screenrecord EVERYTHING, from netflix to espn to hbo. I marked with a red rectangle my settings that I recommend!
Because torrent is another beast, I will not cover it here. But for movies and tv shows I torrent them and then cut clips with an app called bandicut
Once you have your video you need to import it to photoshop. There are basically two options for this.
a) FILE -> IMPORT -> VIDEO FRAMES TO LAYERS
One good thing about this mode is that you can delete some duplicated layers and make the gif smoother. But, there is a limit of the amount of frames it can convert.
Once you have it open like this, you need to change the velocity of each layer by selecting them all and changing the 0,02 to 0,05
Now, I proceed with cropping the gif. The width that works for tumblr is 540px. For gifs side by side it's 268px. And for three gifs side by side it is 178px. The height doesn't matter, that is your choice, how you like the ratio. My standard is 540x400.
Last part of this section is converting all the layers into a smart object which store image data preserving the original and allowing you to modify it without permanently altering it. To do this you need to select all the layers in the layer window on the side, right click on them and select "Convert to Smart Object".
If you imported more frames than needed, u can change the how long ur gif is with the the little rectangles I’m marking in the next section!
b) FILE -> OPEN
This option is faster. I personally use this option also because there is literally no limit of how long the clip can be (although. the shorter the clip, the easier the timeline use).
Once you have the video imported, you have to, again, change the speed. But in this case, the entire video. You want to make it slower, so with the triangle, you change the 100% speed to 50%, duplicating the duration.
Then, you need to do the cropping, exactly the same as I explained it before. And once you do that, you can convert the video group to smart object.
Things to consider: the size of the gif at the end of it all depends, already, of two things done here. The first one, is the duration of the gif, or, more specifically, the amount of frames. And the second one is the width x height. You need to find the balance. For example, for gifs of 540x400 you usually can't go over 5 seconds or 150 frames (depending on the way you get the video, sometimes 5 seconds is less than 150 frames or way more, that is also why deleting some duplicated frames, especially if you screen record, is an advantage).
2: Sharpening -> possibly the most important part of giffing, in my opinion. The details appear clearer by increasing the contrast where different tones meet. It defines the videos more.
For this, my way of doing it is the following one you go to FILTER -> SHARPEN -> SMART SHARPEN and you change the values like this. The one in the top is your base one, and then you duplicate the smart object and change the smart filter to the one at the bottom. On this one, you change the opacity to 50%.
And this is the difference. Of course, this is MY way of doing sharpening, you can always play with the values and find what you like!
One more thing you can add to this step is surface blur, which can help to low quality videos like instagram posts or even twitter posts.
3: Coloring -> this is the fun part. You bring life to the gifs. I mostly use 4 properties for this:
a) CURVES: here you adjust points throughout an image’s tonal range. For this I use the sample that sets to a white point and click around om the lighter parts of the gif to see what I like the most (like the gif below in the left). You can also, by changing the "RGB" to the different colors (red, green, blue), adjust some of the main colors around the gif, maybe suppressing the reds if you see there is too much, or the greens, or the blues. Trying to find a balance.
b) EXPOSURE: here you basically play with the contrast you want. The proper exposure is how much lighter you want the gif, you want to move it towards positive numbers. The offset is you target the shadows of the gif, you want to move it towards the negative numbers, but be careful because it can really fuck up the colors, especially black individuals. Then you have the gamma correction that helps balance a bit the colors that were affected, mostly by the offset, you want to move it to the positive numbers.
What I usually do with the exposure layer is change the blending mode to luminosity, especially when working with clips where the coloring makes them turn a bit orange/red.
c) Selective color: what this does is literally change the way a color shows on the gif. In all gifs, I always change the color black, adding more to it like shown below, to darken the black parts which helps a bit with quality AND makes the gif a bit smaller bc it makes less shades of black (less colors=less heavy).
Another thing I tend to use selective color on is trying to correct some oversaturation of skins (especially on people of color). Usually tweaking red and yellow, but being careful.
One more thing I sometimes like to do is intensify some colors like blue or green. But it is always try and error.
d) Hue/Saturation: this i use for two things. The first one, make lips redder, this is by selecting the Reds and upping the saturation of it. Then with the color range at the bottom i adjust so it only applies to the very red parts of it, because often times red also is found on the skin and we do not want saturation skin.
With the hue slider you can also change specific colors you choose. I sometimes use it to tint the lips a bit pinker if I want to. Or even sometimes change completly some colors like turn a blue to a pink or whatever.
The second thing I mostly use it for is to desaturate some skins, especially when all the rest didn't work. But being very careful about it.
Extra: my favorite way to make the gifs black and white -> gradient map. There is a black&white effect but I don't like it a lot bc it tooks away some depth of it.
Some extra clarifications: i am by no means an expert in skin color colorings, i try very hard to make it work. and all the tips I learned I took them from this tutorial.
4: Exporting -> final part!!! Here you go to FILE -> EXPORT -> SAVE FOR WEB. And this panel opens. The settings that work for my gifs are the ones below. Especially the "pattern" one is life changing. The matte to none is essential if you want gifs that have a transparent background so it does not turn out white.
One important thing also is the colors. Sometimes when gifs are a bit over 10mb you can change the colors from 256 to 200 or even a bit less (not less than 128 I would say, unless you are working with black and white, then you can work with very few colors) so it is less heavy. I try not to do this, but sometimes it's all i can do.
So, in the past year, I've been making gifs actively on this blog (admittedly as an escape from other things I should be doing lol) and though I had a three part tutorial on my process, it has changed quite a bit. I have learned new things, made other tutorials, and in the end, I believe that it is a good time for an update.
This is a general gifmaking tutorial. I managed to keep EVERYTHING within one part, which is huge for me, and I hope that it is still as intelligible as I wanted to make it come across, because I reached the 30 image limit p. fast.
I plan on deleting the original tutorials, so this will be the fixed tutorial from now on, and any updates (tutorials I make later on, etc) will be added to this post as links. I sincerely hope I NEVER have to redo this one, cause it's kind of a drag to write it all lol.
I also decided to screen capture myself making the gifs included in the tutorial, in case you just don't wanna read it.
Here's the video:
The SIENNA portion is a general gif making video and the L AND MISA portion is just me adding the subtitles, per what I show in the tutorial. No sharpening of the gif itself, just the text. The only things excluded from these videos are the capturing of the frames and the loading of them onto photoshop, so this is just the making of the gifs.
I have decided to leave the videos as they were (no cuts, no speed increase, just a super mario world song in the bg) because I wanted to showcase how long it takes for me to, realistically, make 1 gif (and how much I fumble and finesse them.)
Also, notice that these videos have no explanation and are just captures. You can use them as guides in case my explanation gets a little confusing, lol.
Making a gif from absolute scratch (how to capture frames included.)
Making two scenes (or two angles) work within 1 gif.
Subtitled gifs (and how I improved on that front.)
General tips.
Troubleshooting (a.k.a common gif mistakes and how to avoid them. This isn't about aesthetics, this is about the technical aspect, as I tried to keep my aesthetic opinions mostly to myself, only teaching you how to make the thing, so you can develop your personal style.)
I still make all my gifs using the KMPlayer, but sometimes the KMPlayer is not compatible with certain movies, so I also use the GOMPlayer. A problem I have noticed with the KMPlayer is that it sometimes desaturates your image, and therefore your gif. If you are someone who is adept to the vibrance coloring layer, like I am, this may not be a problem, but if you are not, then consider using only GOMPlayer, or other alternatives.
(Remember that the KMPlayer allows you to capture frames while the movie or show is paused, but the GOMPlayer doesn't, which to me is a huge deal breaker.)
Also, I originally recommended capturing PNG frames, but I have since then switched to JPEG, because I noticed that the difference in quality is minimal and it was lighter on my system. And while it is true that the ppi of the images captured is higher on KMPlayer than GOMPlayer, I frequently reopen my gifs on photoshop to alter the timing, which unfortunately damages the quality (making it go to 72 ppi.) That being said, I haven't, personally, seen a huge difference between the original gif and the altered-timing gif.
──── 𝐁𝐈𝐓𝐌𝐀𝐏 𝐆𝐈𝐅𝐒 (𝐚𝐤𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐠𝐢𝐟𝐬):
Like I covered in my previous tutorial, you can also capture BITMAP frames. BITMAP frames are much lower resolution than the rest, but you can still make a gifset with it, and make it look good with coloring. For example, this semi-recent gifset I made of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, was made (erroneously, sorry) using BITMAP frames:
All in all, if you have a bad system, or a computer that isn't as powerful, you can still make gifs, you just need to finesse it a little more. I'll be going over this again later on, more in depth.
𝐏𝐇𝐎𝐓𝐎𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐏:
When it comes to Photoshop, you have to have one that allows you to have the timeline function. CS5 worked for me for years, 2020 also has it, and I'm assuming 2024 does too (but that one didn't work on my computer). I use Photoshop 2020. It doesn't really matter, because as long as you have a PS that has a timeline function, you can make gifsets.
𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒:
There are action packs that make the entire gif for you, if you look for them. I don't like them personally, as I think it's very roundabout and can lead to a lot of mistakes in the process, but if you don't wanna learn it (even though you're… here… for some reason,) look for an action pack.
Open your program of choice. I only know how to capture frames with the KMPlayer and GOM, and I'll be using the KMPlayer for this tutorial, so I'll be showing my KMPlayer Capture settings.
CTRL + G opens the KMPlayer capture window. These are my settings:
I'm Brazilian, so it's in Portuguese, but the numbers and settings don't change. Basically, all you have to do is alter the format to JPEG, make sure that you select the extration to be continuous (right there where it says "continuamente." The first option under the place you select JPEG.) Everything else is a factory setting.
Now, capture the scene you want. The KMPlayer is usually on your local disk, so after that, go to c:/KMPlayer (if applicable) and select the Capture folder (I usually have it on my fast access.) There, you'll find all your frames, which you can divide as you please. This is an example of how I do it:
('A' and 'B' are for alternative gifsets I already have the frames ready to go in. Within those folders, the frames are also divided into folders that are titled '1,' '2,' so on and so forth.)
If you don't have your timeline enabled, go on photoshop and hover over window (on the upper bar.) You'll see an option that says 'timeline,' right there at the bottom:
That's it. Timeline enabled, you're ready to load your frames. Going on the top bar again, select file> scripts> load files into stack, here:
Click on browse and there, load up the frames of the gif you wanna make at the moment. In my case, it's Sienna from Terrifier 2. I'll be using this gif also as an example of what to do to align angles in gifs. I'll get there later, though.
Once everything is open, your workspace should look more or less like this (with my apologies to Lauren LaVera):
Go to your timeline, click "create video timeline" and then select this option in the corner:
(blatantly using my first gifset tutorial's image here)
Now click here on the other corner and on "make frames from layers, to create the rest, like so:
(also, if you're wondering how I changed the color of my 'background' from gray to pink, just right click on the empty space beside the gif and choose 'custom color')
From here on out, everything will be done on the same window where you selected 'make frames from layers' on. Read it carefully, but know that the options you'll use the most will be (from top to bottom):
Select all frames.
Reverse frames.
Match layer across frames.
Convert to vídeo timeline.
(I'll also be showing you what to do with "copy frames" and "paste frames" later on, but for now, this is all you need to know.)
After you make your frames from layers, click on reverse frames. That way, your gif won't play backwards (as photoshop opens it in reverse.)
Now, this is usually the time when I set the frame delay, out of habit. To do so, select all frames, all you have to do is click on the seconds underneath your gif, and select other, like so:
The thing is that I always alter the frame delay after the gif is saved, because when I make gifs and save them for web, they always end up too slow (0,07 seconds) and not my preferred 0,05 to 0,06 seconds (and I don't know how to fix this in other ways.) So setting the frame delay here, at least for me, is more of a habit, though the last frame is always set to 5 seconds after the gif opens. This makes it impossible to play the gif, so you have to set the frame delay.
I, nowadays, usually set everything to 'no delay.' or '0,03.'
After this, I crop the gif. You can crop the gifs at any point of the process (before creating the frames, after the gif is done and you converted to smart object, etc.) but I like to do it here.
The way I crop the gifs is by using the pre-crop tool here:
So, the way the pre-crop tool works is that it will crop your image only in preparation for you to resize it. It will not resize the image for you, so your image will not be 540x405 (as it is in the example.) It will be ready to be resized to that height and width specifically, though.
Back in my day, it really mattered that your width/height were perfect, otherwise your gif would be blurry, but nowadays people use all sorts of heights for their gifs.
The ones I usually use are the following (for my big gifs):
540.
500.
405.
390.
505.
304.
(width is always 540 in my case, but I have experimentally made gifs even up to 800 in width (with 37 frames, so I could sharpen and grain it as much as I wanted) and they work just as well, looking sharp. This is all to say that I REALLY don't know how tumblr is managing their image size limitations. It seems to be on a trial and error basis, which makes sense as this is Tumblr.)
540 and 500 are the hardest to make work, because of the 10mb limitation. As I said, your gif needs to be smaller, and you can't sharpen it too much (so it works better on gifs that are made out of 1080 or 4K releases.)
405 is the most forgiving height, as it is one of tumblr's default expected heights (others being 540 and 304, for rectangular gifs.) You can almost always be assured that a 405x540 gif will be well under 10mb, so you can sharpen it as much as you want (and, sometimes, even add grain on a gif with 48-55 frames, which is a luxury.) Your gif will still be big enough that no major details will be lost, which is an added bonus.
As for the other heights, some quality can be lost (I mostly see it on 540x500 gifs,) and to fix that problem, I just oversharpen when possible.
For my small gifs, I pre-crop them the same way as I do when I make a big gif (so width of the crop tool being 540 and the height being whatever,) and then just resize the gif until the width is at 300p. You can also make regular big gifs and set them side by side without any quality loss, but tumblr itself will hitch and you might get complaints about your gifset crashing the editor, so I prefer to make them smaller in size. I don't often do this, though, so I am not an expert.
Ok, back to the original programming.
Once cropped to your heart's desire, you can do two things: Color your gif or resize it. The order here doesn't matter at all. For the sake of this tutorial, I'll be resizing my gif here.
Go on image>size, like so:
And upon clicking on it, you'll see the actual img. size window.
I have done all sorts of resizing experiments: Going from 1900 to 540 straight away, doing it in several increments (for example, in this case it would be from 1440 to 1000 to 800 to 600 to 540…) and nowadays my usual method is to size the gif down only three times. This preserves the image quality much better because resizing it to 540 right away might blur the image too much, to the point in which sharpening won't work) On the other hand, resizing it too many times makes it oversharpened when you get to the last step of the gif.
So, from here, I'll resize like this:
From 1440 to 1000.
Then 1000 to 800.
Then 800 to 540.
Sometimes a gif has a width of 1900 or 2000+. When that is the case, I go from 1900 to 1200. Then, 1200 to 800, then 800 to 540. 800 to 540 is usually the way I always do things. I know other gifmakers have other methods (esp. those who use 4K, which I don't cause I hate 4K releases, to me they are never worth it) so you can check other tutorials to see how they do it as well. All of my recent gifs (from the end of last year 'til now) have been resized this way.
Ok, gif resized! Now we can color it.
When it comes to coloring, I have a separate coloring tutorial here, detailing my method in a much more in depth way than I could here, and PSDs available here, for free, which you can peruse at your own leisure.
There are also countless other blogs that offer PSDs (several other resource blogs, my most used being @/chaoticresources since I was a teenager) and if you search for 'psd coloring' you'll find several yourself (just make sure they are Photoshop psds, not Photopea psds, as Photopea is the online version of Photoshop, which you can't make gifs on. It's genuinely hearbreaking, I know.)
My honest recommendation is that you play with the coloring settings yourself, though. To start coloring, go to Layers>New Adjustment Layers and then anything you want, like so:
Ok so, for this movie specifically, because it is already a color graded, bright movie (the last of its kind) I will only be doing a very basic psd, so three layers at most.
Once done with that, and because this is a basic gif with no subtitles, you are basically done. Go to your everything window and select 'select all frames.' After that, make sure that all layers underneath your coloring, on the layer window, are selected as well, like so:
Do not select anything else---not subtitles, and not any coloring layers---just the frames.
Now, go to the window again and select 'convert to video timeline.' Once that is done, go on Filter> Convert to Smart Filters, like so:
Once it's all converted to smart filters, we can start sharpening our gif. Because I don't do that myself, I usually use this action here.
But how do you install an action?
First, you go to Window> Actions (or click alt+F9) to make sure Photoshop shows the actions window. Then, you basically download the resource you want (doesn't have to be the one I use) and drag it from the downloads folder to this actions window. There it'll be ready to use.
To ACTUALLY use it, all you have to do is select the setting you want (in my case the 'soft sharpen' one) and press the play button here:
This will play the action for you, on top of the gif.
(this action pack comes with actions that make the entire gif for you from scratch. I don't use those ever, but some people like it.)
I personally use the 'soft sharpen' settings of this action pack for 98% of my gifs nowadays (it's a recent development, as it started in the last three months or so.) The main reason for this is that this action setting helps breathe a new life into shittier releases, soften the edges (so it doesn't have that ugly pixel border you have to manually crop---which I never did so some of my gifs (like here) have it,) and make sure mistakes done in resizing are sharpenable (not a word, but you get it.)
Before I save my gif, I always add another smart sharpen on top of the Action, at these settings:
Sometimes I oscillate between 120 and 150 (even going up to 200,) but it's also a trial and error thing I do.
The reason for this is that this action softens most releases TOO MUCH, making it blurry and dreamy. You can play around with settings, with action packs, with things you get from tumblr.
──── 𝐎𝐍 𝐀𝐃𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐍𝐎𝐈𝐒𝐄:
I add noise mostly to the gifs I make on my more elaborate edits, like here, here, and here. A lot of these gifs are very small in comparison to the canvas, like so:
Which means that the size of the gif is not super altered. The main things that affect gif size are: Amount of colors, sharpening, and noise, noise being the biggest gifsize killer (sometimes even 1 of noise is enough to tank a gif.)
I also add noise on my smaller gifs, because usually those are from worse releases, and noise can sometimes make it seem like the image is crispier (like in the aforementioned Death Note Misa gifs, those have 2 of noise added to them.)
I personally love getting away with adding noise, so I will try it a lot of the times (without success :/) I usually add the noise on top of all the other smart sharpen settings, BUT I can also sometimes add it in the middle, so the noise looks even more pronounced.
How do you add noise then? Simple, go here:
Then select how much you want it based on how you feel about it. Usually, anything over 3 in regular gifs is too much, but my Longlegs edit gifs had 5 or 6 added (those are special gifs, though.)
───── 𝐒𝐀𝐕𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐖𝐄𝐁:
Your gif is done, sharpened, noised, whatever it is you did! How do you save this now? Because I use the shortcut, I usually just hit CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+S automatically, but here's where you go to do it manually:
(I know this is a different gif, but bear with me, it's just an example photo)
Here is where you see your gif size, how many colors there are (up there, 256. You can alter this, but I'll go over it later.) These are the regular settings, I believe, but as it is here they are. All you have to do now is check to see if the gif is under 10mb and save if so. That's it.
Anyway, this is the general gist of how I do a very straightforward gif.
Now onto…
Now, the dreaded two angled gif. This gif we are working on is one of these, which is why it only had 25 frames originally.
The two angle thing I'm talking about is this: Sometimes, there are scenes where one character talks on the right and the other on the left, a classic cinema trope, but you still have to make it into a singular gif.
So, how do you make this work and be symmetrical at the same time?
Basically, you will first load one side of the gif, in this case Sienna looking at the fire, as one gif. Then you'll load the other scene (the fire) separately, as another gif. Now you'll have two gifs instead of one.
You'll then make these gifs (up until the coloring) separately. You'll crop them the way you want them to look (centered, at the preferred angle) and you'll join them (in the example video, I joined them before I resized them.)
Go to the second gif (chronologically) and select the 'Select All Frames' option. After that, click 'Copy Frames,' like so:
Then, go on your other gif, and click 'Paste Frames' on the same window. You'll be greeted with this (yes, it's a different gif, I had to improvise here):
Select 'Paste After Selection' (which is why it is important you do this chronologically,) and then your gif will be one continuous thing, at the exact angle you want. Remember that you cannot recrop it anymore now, so the gifs need to be perfect individually before being joined.
Another thing is that the coloring comes AFTER the pasting of the second gif, because otherwise the PSD gets buried in the new frames and it is sort of annoying to retrieve it from down there, so it's easier if you add it only afterwards.
Are there other ways of doing this? Yes. You can load the entire gif, then select the frames you want to transfer, copy them, open a new document with the width you want, transfer them to said new document (by creating video timeline and making frames from the singular layer of the new document, then pasting the frames OVER selection, not after,) resize them using the transformation tool, delete the frames on the original gif, and proceed as usual…
But this is a beginner tutorial and I didn't want to burden you with a harder, more roundabout way of doing things just because.
Anyway, here's the (full) gif we made (together!):
How do I add subtitles to my gifs? I'll be using a DN gif as an example for this.
Basically, do the gif as usual, all the way to the coloring, leaving it ready to save. Before you do, though, select the text tool (making sure that you are on frame 1 when you do this,) and draw a box on top of the gif like so:
(I use Arial Rounded MT Bold, but I have also used Arial Bold Italic for ages.)
Replace the Lorem Ipsum (that doesn't exist on PCS5, lol) with the text you want. In my case, it's 'hello!' Then, if you click on the 'fx' there at the bottom, like so:
You'll be taken to a little window. The only things you will use will be the stroke and the drop shadow. Once you click on stroke, you can choose how thick you want the contour outside of the letters to be. Mine is always at 1, and the color is '282828' or approx. (always a darkish gray, as it is a personal preference of mine.)
Now, for drop shadow, my settings are always changing. Here they are now:
But frequently I use no 'spread' and no 'size,' leaving it pure black and at a distance of 1 or 2.
Ok, after this, make sure the text is centered (again, always on frame 1 so your text will be the same in every single other frame. In case it is not, just go on the window where you do everything and click on 'Match Layer Across Frames' with the text selected in your layer box.) Convert to video timeline as usual, sharpen your gif, and then sharpen the text individually with other settings (converting it to smart filter in the proccess.) In this case, instead of it being 100+, 0.3, like the last sharpen I add over ALL of my gifs is, I use 32, 0.3, to make the text just SLIGHTLY sharper. It's not perfect, but it's what I've been doing. Different heights demand different sharpen settings, though. (For example, H: 405p usually demands a sharpening setting of 22 instead of 32, which I forgot for the example gif lol.)
Like everything else, play around with it and see how you feel about things.
Here's the gif, done:
Ok, so now the thing is that the 'hello' is there even when Misa's not talking. Now, in 2015 or so, it was common practice to make gifs with text only appearing when the character was talking (so the subtitle would spontaneously appear on top of the gif at the appointed frames where it was relevant for it to be there.) I personally don't like that, because it can make it confusing in systems where the gifs take longer to load (like mobile, for example,) buuuuuuut, here's how to do it.
Let's retrace our steps to when we just added the text, the drop shadow, and the stroke on top, making sure the text is centered, etc. Select the frames on the timeline where Misa is NOT talking. Then, click on the eye icon next to the text layer, like so:
Do the same for the other part of the gif where she is not talking, and then you'll have her text only when her mouth is moving. Here's the end result:
I think this is a very good example as to why people don't do this (but here is a very inept gifset I made of My Best Friend Is A Vampire that exemplifies it further.) Also, you can't sharpen text that is like this, only text that is the same across all frames, so your subtitles might be blurry.
Bad, imo, on all fronts.
MAKING GIFS (THAT ARE HUGE) WORK UNDER 10MB (somehow):
ALTERING AMOUNT OF COLORS:
Remember when I showed you the save for web window and showed you the color amount (by default, 256)? So, you can alter that. You can put any number you want from 0 to 256, and that way you can (easily) make the 10mb size drop---but your gif quality will suffer, so use it sporadically.
ALTERING THE AMOUNT OF FRAMES:
When altering the amount of colors is not enough, sometimes you have to hack at the gif. No other way around it. Go back and delete until you have 48 frames. 48, imo, is the golden number for this, because it's not a super short gif and not a super heavy gif.
GIFS USING BITMAP AS THE FRAME FORMAT:
Ok, so I wanted to talk about this here, after I taught you how to make a gif, to make it easier for you to understand what I'm explaining.
It'll be brief.
Basically, because BITMAP is so much lighter, older systems have an easier time grabbing frames. So, how do I make BITMAP gifs work?
First, you have to absolutely get the highest quality release possible (no 720p, nothing under 2GB…) Then, it's quite literally all in the coloring. You have to trial and error a lot to make sure the coloring doesn't fry the gif and make it look like it's a low quality film. Because a lot of the movies I like are either underground or not remastered properly (A Simple Wish, the Death Note movies, even Antiviral,) I have certain experience with having to create workarounds to make certain media work.
─── Tips I have in your case:
Gifs that are too brightened show the low bitrate. Alternatively, too much vibrance does the same. My 'L Change the WorLd' gifsets are a good example of me deliberately going against this rule, and frying the gifs a little bit (especially the subway scene here) (https://www.tumblr.com/theunmarkedtombstone/819474393317146624/l-change-the-world-2008)
Try to make it a little darker, a little more opaque. My 'Death Note: The Last Name' Misa Amane gifs are a good example of me following this better, especially the one in which she finds her parents killed. (https://theunmarkedtombstone.tumblr.com/post/819824228147822592/death-note-the-last-name-dir-shusuke-kaneko)
See if the gifs wouldn't behave better as 300p in width instead of 540p (or, alternatively, 304 in height, preserving the movie's natural aspect ratio, only resizing it.) I know we all want to make huge, lavish gifsets, but unfortunately the media we love isn't always up to speed (my Misa gifs are also a good example,) so we need to make do with what we have. This is a tip that is mostly geared towards low quality releases than BITMAP gifs, but it's good to see if you can get away with at least a smaller gifset. The vantage being that, at 268-300p (approx.) you can get more frames in and make more detailed gifsets.
Something else I have to say is that the action you use to sharpen can make or break your gif. The soft sharpen setting I use does save a lot of lower quality releases, and if you have smaller gifs, you can add noise to them. I love noise. It's up to you, though.
─── 𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐁𝐋𝐄𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 (aka common mistakes, and how to fix them):
─── Mistake 1:
I converted my gif into smart object, but it ended up not moving when I saved for web, being well under 10mb (usually 150k.)
Solution:
This is because you forgot to hit "convert to vídeo timeline" again before you converted it to smart filters. If you can still see the frames on the timeline as if you were still in the middle of making the gif after you turn it into smart object, you need to retrace a step. I used to do this one all the time, so I get it. The hastiness of it all.
─── Mistake 2:
My new edits need to be manually added on each frame of the gif, so I have to keep clicking "match layer across frames" every five seconds.
Solution:
You have to make sure that 'propagate frame 1,' is always selected, especially on Photoshop 2020 (where this matters the most, since in CS5 you have to do everything on frame one.) Propagate frame 1 is located above your layers on your layer tab.
─── Mistake 3:
Propagate frame 1 IS selected. I'm still facing the same problem as above.
Solution:
Make sure that, a little underneath "match layer across frames," the option "new layers visible in all frames" is also selected.
─── Mistake 4:
My entire gif is the same frame. I have no idea what happened.
Solution:
You probably clicked on the 'eye' icon next to any of the frames of your gif (the same I showed you on the subtitle portion of this tutorial,) which made only one frame visible. The only way to fix this is by CTRL+Z-ing your way until this isn't the case anymore (sorry :/)
─── Mistake 5:
There is a blank frame on my gif when I save for web, what do I do?
Solution:
Save, reopen, delete the ghost frame (but you'll lose that frame.) Alternatively, you can CTRL+Z all the way back if you want, but some edit choices cause a blank frame at the end, unfortunately. This is how I deal with them.
Ok, so this is it! Thanks for reading it so far. If you have any doubts whatsoever, feel free to send me an ask, I'm not realy cagey about my methods. These are gifs on tumblr.com the website and the app. And I want people to have fun with them.
See ya!
