How to make a gif without photoshop!
Photoshop is definitely the best to make gifs these days--it has a lot of great features and is generally unparalleled. That being said, it can definitely be difficult to download without purchasing, and most of us don’t have enough money to buy it legally. I know that I’ve struggled to find photoshop downloads for my Mac, and for a while, I thought I wouldn’t be able to make quality gifs. I played around with GIMP a little bit, but I found it quite difficult to use, there were no good gif plugins that worked on Mac, and I couldn't find any tutorials that produced high quality, photoshop-like gifs. So, I have come up with a way to make gifs involving little downloading and primarily two websites.
The first step is to find a high-quality video that you want to make into a gif. THIS IS CRUCIAL! We’re going to need as much quality as we can get, especially since we’re moving our gif around from website to website rather than keeping it in one place. I was able to use a torrented version of Thor: The Dark World that my friend found. I then used command-shift-5 on my Macbook to take a video screenshot of the segment in the film that I wanted. I believe in Windows 10, you would press Win+Alt+R, but I’m not sure. Depending on what device you’re using, even mobile devices, you should be able to easily record your screen. If not, there are plenty of free programs that let you do this, such as this one.
Once you’ve got your video, go to this website to convert it to a gif. .MOV and .MP4 files work best. I set it to 540 px, 10 FPS, 5 seconds that I liked, and clicked convert.
Now that you have your gif, download it and open it in the website photopea. This website has many photoshop like features and can open PSD files. It is definitely the best website I’ve found so far for opening PSDs.
I deleted every other frame to condense my video down to only 22 frames. This is optional, but will make your gif faster and smaller in size. Remember, you cannot upload a gif to Tumblr that exceeds 3.1 MB, or else Tumblr will compress it for you and make it look very low quality.
Select all the layers at once by holding down shift as you click from the top layer to the bottom and play around with them until the gif looks bright and sharp. I personally chose:
Filter: Noise: Add Noise... : 3%
Filter: Sharpen: Smart Sharpen: 15%, 1.5px
Image: Adjustment: Exposure: 1.4
If you want more edits, download a PSD from a photoshop resources page such as this one and open it in photopea. Drag the folder with the PSD over to the tab with your gif to place it on top of the gif.
To add text, just click the T button on your left and place a text layer on top of your gif. Make sure it ends up on top of your frames. Pick a simple font with the color white and rasterize the layer when you’re done by going to Layer: Rasterize. To add a black border around the text, go to Edit: Stroke, and select your preferences. For a gif of 540 px, I think 3px of a black border is more than enough.
Now you’re done! Export your file as a gif and upload to Tumblr :)
