My Gif-Making Process
Hello! I'm Gilli and I've been making gifs for a very long time and have recently been asked a few times about my process. So I've decided to go into detail on that. Probably too much detail. But this should help out anyone that wants to make gifs of their own whether it's of video game footage they've recorded or movies/shows that they own physical copies of.
Below the cut is a step-by-step process that I go through, plus information on how to record their game/rip blu-rays to a PC for those that don't know how to do such. There are screenshots showing the entire process of me making a single gif and the end results of that.
I hope everyone finds at least one thing in this they find useful. 💖
Programs Used:
OBS Studio KMPlayer Photoshop MakeMKV
I wanted to start with how to record your game footage and how to rip blu-rays to your PC for those that aren't too sure about how to do that.
To record your own game footage, you'll need a program that records your screen as you play. For that, I use OBS Studio.
To set it up to record your screen, go down to the sources section and click add display capture. From there it'll have you pick which display it will be capturing, it should automatically have your primary monitor selected but if that isn't the case click the drop-down menu and pick the one that you'd be using to play games on. And make uncheck the box for capture cursor, as no one wants a flying cursor to ruin their footage.
You may need to resize the capture window to fit, but all that takes is hovering your mouse over it, clicking, and dragging it to fit.
Next, you should go into the settings set up a few things. Mostly to make sure it'll be capturing at the right FPS and the folder the videos will save to when you record.
These are the settings I use. I don't mess with the audio portions since that doesn't matter for gifs.
If you're using a capture card for a console, you can add that source to OBS, as well. This is what that looks like (you'll need to drag the window to fit here, as well.).
I don’t mess with the settings, as I’ve never needed to.
And now may be good to note that with older consoles the default FPS is 30. If you want to record footage of that you'll want to switch the number that's captured down to 30 as well so your gifs don't have extra frames.
With that all set up, you'll need to open up the game you're wanting to record. Sometimes recording is simple and other times it's a bit of a pain in the ass. When it's simple, you'll be able to alt+tab out of the game and start recording with OBS whenever you wish, so you won't have to make a huge video file for only a minute or two of footage that you want.
When it’s difficult, however, the game doesn't like being alt+tabbed out of and starts running sluggishly when you do that. When that happens, save and close out altogether. Then start recording with OBS before opening the game and go from there. It's a little bit of a process to find out which game is which, but it isn't a difficult one.
And to record a video in OBS, simply hit the Start Recording button and you're good to go. When you’re finished, click it again. And that’s it.
As for ripping blu-rays to your PC, you'll need to have either an external or internal drive that's able to read blu-rays and MakeMKV. And you should make sure you have enough space on your PC for it. I've found single episodes of a show can be anywhere from 5 GB to 20, and movies are larger the longer they are. The average I've run into is about 30 GB.
If you have all that set up and ready to use, start MakeMKV and click to open the blu-ray disk.
The movie (or episode) file tends to be the largest on the disk. Uncheck everything else and choose your output folder.
Then hit Make MKV and wait until it's done. The ensuing file should easily play in KMPlayer, or your program of choice.
________________________________________________________
Now, with all of that out of the way, we can get to the actual gif-making of this gif-making tutorial.
When you've got the video you want to capture frames of, open it up in your program of choice and capture away. These are the settings I tend to use.
To open the frames in Photoshop, click File and go down to Scripts > Load Files into Stack.
In the Use dropdown menu, click on Folder. Then click Browse and find the folder you loaded your frames into. If you want to make sure the files load in order, go ahead and click Sort By Name. It’s usually not necessary, but it could cut out the time it’ll take to reload the frames again if something goes wrong.
It should be noted that the process of loading frames will take longer the bigger they are, hence why I use the JPEG setting instead of PNG. I've not noticed a change in quality between PNG and JPEG, but if you wish to make sure you're using the best quality possible, go ahead and use PNGs, just know that this part might take some extra time if you do.
With everything loaded, click the Create Frame Animation button in the timeline window. Then, find the three small lines near the X that closes the Timeline window, and click on that then select Make Frames From Layers.
After this, you might need to highlight all the frames and, in the same menu, click reverse frames. It’s not actually reversing the gif, but making it so it plays correctly. For some reason, this happens a lot for me in Photoshop. I cannot explain why it does, just how to fix it. And it takes all of .5 seconds to do that.
Next comes the more tedious step in this whole process. You’ll want to go through each frame and make sure there’s no doubles. If there is, it’ll mess with the timing of the finished product. Double frames can make a gif seem slower than it should be overall, or just in certain parts. If you’re making a gif with a lot of frames it can be annoying, but it’s worth it in the end.
My next step is always to crop the canvas down with the crop tool. For simple scenery gifs that I save at 540x480 pixels, I use a preset that I made. 6:5. Then I'll drag and/or shrink it down to exactly what part of the canvas that I want to gif. In this case, I moved it a smidge to the right and hit crop.
Then I resize it. Since I've noticed that sometimes there's a small line around some gifs, I resize it down to 582x485 pixels so there's some extra I can crop out around the edges. It's a personal preference, you don't need to do this. It’s just something I’ve done for years.
From here, I start coloring/lighting. Most of the time, I use five layers for this. But every so often the gifs will need a bit extra to get them where I want them and I can end up with 10. It all depends on whatever it is I’m making gifs of. For the gif in this example, I'll be using my usual five layers. Levels, Curves, Select Color, Exposure, and Vibrance. I don't believe the order of the layers matters, but I always start with lighting and move on to the color.
This part is all personal taste. The way I choose to color things might not be how you like it. If that's the case, switch things up. Experiment. If you want things brighter, with the colors more saturated, try upping the levels on those layers. Hell, you might not even want to mess with the colors at all, just brighten things up which is totally fine. But these are the settings I've decided to use for this particular gif, for those that might be curious.
This is what the gif looks like before any coloring, sharpening, and without tweaking the frame delay.
First, I use a Levels layer. Most of the time I use it to start brightening things up, but sometimes I only use it to darken the shadows a bit. This time, I’m doing a little of both.
Then it's onto Curves for a little more brightening and some contrast. I use these sparingly. It's very easy to wash everything out.
And one last brightening layer, Exposure. I've never touched the Offset option. I don't know what it does and at this point, I'm too afraid to ask.
Next is Vibrance. So that I know exactly how much I need to fix/change the coloring. I don't like to make my gifs too saturated, so I don't mess with these settings very much.
And now comes the fun part. Actually coloring the gifs. I tend to situate my Selective Color layer between the Curves and Exposure layers, but I don't think it matters where it goes.
Here’s what it looks like before coloring.
This is another super subjective and personal series of settings. For this gif, I want to bring out more of the warm orange and yellow shades without washing out the green of the conifers in the background, but you might want to bring out cool tones instead. There's no wrong way to color gifs.
As I’m sure you noticed, with this gif I’m not messing with the Cyan, Blue, or Magenta modifiers. Not every gif needs to use every single modifier, and that’s fine.
This is the end result of all those steps.
And next is the sharpening. Select all the frames in the Timeline and the Layers window, head on over to those three little lines in the right corner of the Timeline window, and select Convert to Video Timeline.
Then click Filter > Convert for Smart Filters.
And then Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen.
I use two sharpening layers and these settings aren't set in stone. Sometimes this is too much, sometimes it's not enough and I need to up some settings. It's just another one of those things you can to tweak as you work.
On the second layer, I hit the gear next to the OK button and selected both Use Legacy and More Accurate, then adjust as I wish.
Then I save it. I do not understand these settings. One might think that I would after using them for so long, but I do not. Please don't ask me about them or I might cry.
We’re not done quite yet. As I'm sure you noticed, the gif is a bit too large a file for Tumblr's 10 MB limit and I haven't even touched the frame delay settings. That's because I do it once the coloring and everything else is done.
Go to whatever folder you've saved your work in and drag the gif/s into Photoshop. Once they’re loaded, select all the frames in the timeline and click on any of the small arrows pointing down in the right-hand corner of each frame in the timeline, then select Other, then you'll need to set your frame delay.
For 30 FPS (console games and live action, usually) I use .05 and for 60 I use .04.
Next, I delete frames as needed to fit under Tumblr's limits. And with that done, this is the final result next to where I started out, so you can see the differences more clearly.
Before:
After:
I’m pretty sure I’ve gone over everything, but since I’ve been doing this for so long that I easily could have missed something since I’m so used to seeing it all the time. If anyone has questions, I’m more than happy to answer them. ❤️
