#ps tip

[psychictwinsrph]

hello! do you guys know any way to reduce gif size without reducing too much of the quality? thank you!

Under the cut are some tricks I’ve learned over the years. If you have any questions about any of the methods, just ask!

You can make the canvas a little smaller (ex: making a 245x160 px gif 245x145 px). I don’t really like doing that mostly because I have a thing for 245x160 but that’s a personal thing. Depending on what’s in the parts of the canvas you’re getting rid of, this can make the gif size a lot smaller without changing the quality of it at all. Of course, this can also crop out something you want in the gif

You can use a black/white gradient to make everything greyscale. The gif won’t immediately go down in size (in fact, it might go up) but from there you can lower the amount of colors from 256 to something lower without drastically reducing quality. If the rest of your gifset isn’t black and white, though, this can look out of place.

You could pull a classic tumblr (excuse me while I shudder at remembering the 500 kb gif size limit) and make a portion of the gif static. If the clip you’re using is from a relatively still shot, you can do what I did when I made this gif seven million years ago. The camera was still but this clip had a shakey effect you can still see in the parts of the gif that moved that made the gif a lot bigger than the 1.05mb limit tumblr had at the time. To make the gif smaller and more of the background static, I duplicated one of the layers, placed it above all the others and used a layer mask to erase the parts of the gif that were in motion. This can drastically lower the file size, depending on how much of the gif you make static.

Similar to the last one and just as classic tumblr gif: you can paint part of the canvas one color. Here are a couple of more recent examples where I did this for aesthetic reasons as opposed to for size reasons (1, 2) and screencaps from the clips i used to make those gifs (1, 2). As you can see, the originals didn’t have the sections of pure black. To achieve that, I just created a new layer and used a large brush with 0% hardness to paint over parts of the background with black. Instant size savings.

Finally, the one I do the most: reducing the amount of frames. When I make gifs, I use every frame. I think this makes for smoother gifs but it also allowes me to get rid of frames without making the gif too laggy. So if I have a gif that’s coming out like 3mb instead of under 2mb (which happens to me a lot bc I like to make my gifs kinda long), I might get rid of, say, every third or fourth frame to make it the right size. Make sure you double the timing of the frame before the ones you deleted so that speed of the gif doesn’t randomly speed up every third frame. So, 0.06 delay would become 0.12, 0.05 would be come 0.1, ect. If you want an example, open up this gif in photoshop and see how every third one has a different time delay.

[jsuh]

hii pixie ur coloring looks so amazing here 😭 /post/662325636433608704 is it ok if u shared it ? or something similar? thank you so much either way! ❤️❤️❤️

hi! first of all sorry for such a late response, but i had no energy to get on desktop, but i wanted to give you a proper response

okay so! i can't really share the psd, cause it's one of my base psds that i use for everything with couple little changes lmao but i can tell you what i usually do

it really depends on the video of course, but to achieve the warm soft look and get rid of the blueish/pale coloring of nct life you basically want to enhance the reds using color balance (that's usually my very first layer, if the video looks blue i just enhance the reds, if it's too yellow i'm trying to fix that etc.) and selective color, it's always very random and i add couple layers sometimes, for example:

i enhance the blacks usually using selective color as well, adjust levels and curves and just play with the colors until it looks good to me

on top of everything after 70 layes of selective color i add exposure and this is basically how it usually looks like, depending on the video

my favorite tip to get rid of one annoying color is using hue/saturation, for example if a music show or idk a piece of clothing has annoying blue tint you can make it purple or completely black and make your gif look more hq

i'm sorry this is not helping much, but if you have any more questions you can hit me up in dms! i'd share the base psd, but it took me a while and i use it on most of my sets currently lmao i'm sorry :(

[psychictwinsrph]

Hiya! I've just made my first gif and I'm using it for a promo image, and I'm wondering how you got text to stay on each frame?

Congrats on making your first gif! Ngl, this one took me a while to figure out myself. (Oh, and I should warning, I only know how to do this on Photoshop.) If you’re not careful, the text will only be where you want it to be on one frame. I find that adjusting placement on the FIRST frame will usually make it the same on the others. But if that doesn’t work, select your text layer. Then, click on those four lines with the downfacing arrow to the left of them right above the frames. A menu will open and then you can click “Match Layer Across Frames...” and now the text should be in the same place across all of your frames. 

Here is what it looks like in my photoshop (plus some poor drawings I did to help you identify things).

Oh, another warning: if you’re doing, like, a fade effect or something with your text, doing this will mess up your layer style settings, should they be different on different frames because, well, now that layer will match across all frames.