Zoom In Gif Effect!
This tutorial assumes you already know how to make gifs
If not, you can see the way I make mine here
This tutorial will be in two parts: static zoom and moving zoom.
I haven’t really seen any other tutorials for this, so if there is one and I missed it, I’m sorry. This is just how I figured out how to do the zoom effect!
STATIC ZOOM
So this will be just focusing on one frame, a still image, zoomed in on.
You want to start off when you’ve compressed your gif into frames/the frame rate is correct/the gif is made essentially exactly how you want it to look, so that means sharpening/colouring/etc. Depending on where you want your zoom, you need to select whichever frame you want to start on. For ease of tutorial purposes, and because I think this is a funny moment, we’re starting on the very last frame.
You want to open the little three row menu, and click on “new frame”. It’ll just copy the last frame you have, and you can do this as many times as you like, obviously dependent on the size of the gif and the tumblr gif size limit. I’m going to do it about 15 times.
So from frames 52-65, these are all duplicates of the final frame (51).
Now, if you want to zoom in on the same vertical spot, I reccomend using the guide tool, to make sure the placement of your zoom is central (we will talk about moving the gif later). For this, you want to go to view > new guide.
It doesn’t really matter about the placement of the guide generally, as you might want to zoom in on different places, not necessarily the middle. I recommend dragging it to where you want it, so just make sure it’s vertical to start, and click ok. As you can see, in this case, Andrew’s face is directly in the middle of the gif.
Here’s where the irritating part comes in for static images. For every duplicate frame you made, you need a corresponding duplicate layer, so that you’re not working on the same canvas for each frame (otherwise it won’t reigster that you’re ‘zooming’ in on the image).
As you can see, each frame corresponds to a different visible layer (the eye). When you zoom in on a moving gif, you don’t have this problem, as each frame just moves along its partner layer; but with a static zoom, you need to make the duplicate layers for the frame to correspond to.
Once you’ve done this you can slowly (so it looks smooth) zoom in on layers. By pressing ctrl/command and T, you can increase the size of your image, moving frame by frame, increasing the size little by little.
The gif size is 540px by 400 px, so I’ve decided to zoom in by 10px height each time, until I run out of frames. When resizing the image, always remember to hold down the shift button as you drag, so that the gif resizes in the same proportions. Once you’re finished, click enter to save the changes.
However, once you do the first one, you’ll notice the layer is now in the wrong position. You can leave it like this if you want it to zoom at an angle, but if you want it centrally, you can either drag it back to the middle (using the guide, as well, a guide) or, you can use photoshop’s tools to do so:
Control/command A selects the entire image, and then this button on the top toolbar will place it in the middle again, like so. Make sure you have the move tool selected to ensure you can see these symbols.
In this case, I’m only centering the gif vertically, not horiztonally. I’m going to talk a bit more about that in the moving zoom section. But essentially you want to keep going along the layers and frames, zooming in. As you can see - I labelled mine so I didn’t get confused about the height sizes.
And in the end, you can save as usual [file > export > save for web (legacy)], and you should end up with something like this:
I just added the text for giggles, showing the type of things we can do with these gifs.
MOVING ZOOM
Arguably easier, as the frames already have corresponding layers, so you don’t have to mess around with duplicating them or anything like that.
The reason I showed the above step is because I feel like it’s important to know how to do it statically, to understand the mechanisms you’re working with, etc. Editing layers and frames can be tricky, because if you mess one thing up, it can sometimes negatively impact all the frames that came before it, and it can be hard to rectify that. So I would say just be careful and take your time!
I went back and remade the gif, just to give myself some more frames to work with at the end. If it’s too big (sidenote: it was, haha), I’ll just delete some off the beginning/end of the gif, before I save.
For the first zoom, I do exactly what we did above, except you can just work along the frames and layers as provided. I zoomed in by 20px height this time, so 400px, 420px, 440px, etc. I used the same method of one single vertical guide, moving the gif into the middle, and then moving onto the next frame. That ended up giving me this:
However, the most effective zoom is probably when you keep the gif ‘central’, as if you really are zooming in on one point. The best method I found for this was to add another guide, this time horizontal, and pick a reference point you want to use as your ‘centre’. In this case, I used the shiny little tip of Andrew’s nose as my middle.
Note: this doesn’t have to be the middle of the gif, it just has to be a central point. Think of it as your gif expanding out from this anchor point, like when you resize your canvas and it shows you this:
Then go along, zooming and resizing, but make sure this time that you not only align centrally with the vertical line, but that whatever you chose as the ‘middle’ point, aligns with your horizontal marker as well. You could use the layer aligners in the top toolbar for this as well, but that only really works if your zoom is dead centre, which mine may look like it is, but it wasn’t.
In the end, you should get something that looks like this:
You can also move the placement of the zoom, it doesn’t have to be zooming towards the centre of the gif itself. As you can see here, I moved the frames closer and closer to the top left-hand corner, because I wanted it to appear as if Din was getting in Boba’s face about this argument:
You could also zoom in and out, (just enlarge the layers and remember your heights, then size the images down in reverse order), or make the gif shake (move the image slightly to the left and then right as you zoom, I haven’t tried it, but I’d recommend doing AT LEAST three frames on each side (for each direction), as otherwise I’d assume it’ll move too quickly and won’t look smooth), by doing the same things. It’s just about the placement of the frames and layers. The same principle can apply to zooming in on text, moving it up/down/etc, on each frame of the gif.
Post that inspired this tutorial!
I hope this makes sense and I hope it’s helpful! If you have any questions, feel free to drop me an ask! I’m not an expert by any means, but I’m sure we can figure it out together 🥰