#actions panel in photoshop

[y-eontan]

[pancyp]

Rita - Retaw ep.4 update#2

I’m going to try to not be lazy and finish this as soon as I can. Episodes 1-3 are free to read on Webtoon and Tapas.

[userpeggycarter]

COLORING + SHARPENING TUTORIAL

someone asked for a coloring tutorial and my sharpening settings, so here it is! there are also a few tips to achieve more HQ gifs. :)

tutorial under the cut!

FOR HIGH-QUALITY GIFS

FILE SIZES

it doesn’t matter what your sharpening settings are if the file you’re using to gif is too low quality, so i tend to look for the best that i can get when downloading stuff. 

usually, movies (+2h) look better if they’re 5GB or more, while an episode (40 min/1h) can look good with even 1GB. the minimum definition i try to find is 1080p, but i gif with 2160p (4k) when available. unfortunately, not every computer can handle 4k, but don’t worry, you can gif with 1080p files just fine if they are big enough. contrary to popular belief, size does matter! which means sometimes a bigger 1080p file is better than a smaller 2160p one, for example.

SCREENCAPPING METHOD

this can too influence the quality of your gifs. as a gifmaker, i’ve tried it all: video frames to layers, directly opening video clips, loading files into stack, and i’ve finally settled down with opening screencaps as an image sequence. with bigger files, it doesn’t matter much what technique you use, but i’ve noticed with smaller files you can do wonders if you screencap (either by loading files into stack or opening as an image sequence) instead of using video clips. for example, this gif’s original video file was only 4GB (so smaller than i’ve usually go for), if you can believe it!

here’s a tutorial for setting up and screencapping with MPV, the media player i use to screencap. again, you can keep using video clips for bigger files, but you’ll find this useful when dealing with dire causes. i don't file loads into stack, though, like the video does. i open as an image sequence (open > screencap folder > select any image > click the image sequence button). just select OK for the speed. this will open your screencaps as a video clip (blue bar) in timeline mode (i'm a timeline gifmaker, i don't know about you). you will need this action pack to convert the clip into frames if you're a frames gifmaker. i suggest you convert them into frames even if you're a timeline gifmaker, just convert them into a timeline again at the end. that way you can delete the screencaps right away, otherwise you will delete the screencaps and get a static image as a "gif".

ATTENTION if you’re a Mac Sonoma user, MPV won’t be an option for you unless you downgrade your system. that is, if you have an Intel chip. if you have M1 Max chip (or even a better one), here’s a fix for MPV you can try while keeping that MacOS, because nowadays MPV is skipping frames in its latest build. or you can use MPlayer instead for less hassle. here are two tutorials for setting and using MPlayer. Windows users are fine, you can use MPV without trouble.

FOR EVEN MORE QUALITY

ADD NOISE

here’s a tutorial for adding noise as a way to achieve more HQ gifs if your original material is too low quality.

REDUCE NOISE WITH CAMERA RAW

instead of adding noise, you can reduce it, especially if your gif is very noisy as it is. 

the path is filter > camera raw > detail > nose reduction. i do this before sharpening, but only my video file isn't great to begin with. because it’s a smart filter, you can reduce or increase its opacity by clicking the bars next to its name in the layers panel.

TOPAZ AI

i use Topaz Photo AI to increase the quality of my screencaps when i need to. it’s paid software, but there are… ways to find it for free, usually on t0rrent websites. if someone’s interested, i can make a tutorial solely about it in the future.

SHARPENING SETTINGS

here are my sharpening settings (filter > sharpen > smart sharpen). i sharpen things twice: 500% 0.4px + 10% 10px. here's an action for it, for more convenience. here's a tutorial on how to use Photoshop actions. for animated stuff, i use this action pack.

COLORING

here’s the gif i'm gonna use as a base. it’s already sharpened like the way i always do it.

LIGHTNING THE SHOTS

half of the secret of a good coloring is good lightning. i always useCurves (layers > new adjustment layer > curves) and Brightness & Contrast (layers > new adjustment layer > brightness & contrast). the settings depend on the scene you’re giffing, but i always try make my gifs bright and with high contrast to make the colors pop.

CURVES

besides lighting your scene, the Curves adjustment layer has four automatic options that will color-correct it for you. it’s not always perfect and it doesn’t mean you won’t need to do further coloring, but it’s a great start. it’s a lifesaver for most ridiculously yellow scenes. look at the difference! this gif uses the 3rd automatic option (the screenshot below isn't mine btw so that's why the fourth option is the chosen one), from top to bottom. what automatic option you need to choose depends on the gif.

sometimes i like to tweak my Curves layer. not everybody does that, it’s not that necessary and if you’re not careful, it can screw your gif up. to modify your layer by hand, you will need to click and drag points of that straight line in the position you desire. this is the concept behind it:

basically, the lower part of the line handles the shadows, while the upper part handles the highlights of the image. if you pull a highlight point up, the image’s highlights will be brighter. if you pull it down, it will make them darker. same thing for the shadow points. you should play with it to get a grasp of it, that’s what i did when i first started giffing.

BRIGHTNESS & CONTRAST

then i added a bit of brightness and contrast.

CHANNEL MIXER

the scene looked a bit too yellow, so i used the Channel Mixer (layer > new adjustment layer > channel mixer) adjustment layer. here’s a tutorial of how it works. not every scene needs the Channel Mixer layer though, i mostly use it to remove heavy overall tints. in this particular case, the Curves layer got rid of most of the yellow, but i wanted the gif to be just a bit more blue so the Channel Mixer tweaks are very minimal.

SELECTIVE COLOR

now, this adjustment layer i always use: Selective Color (layer > new adjustment layer > selective color). this is THE adjustment layer to me, alongside the Curves one. this is how it works:

ie, you can separately edit a color this way, giving it tints. for this gif, i wanted to make the colors more vibrant. to achieve that, i edited the selected colors this way:

for the reds, i added even more red in them by moving the first slider to the right, making the color more vibrant. for his hat to have a more warm tint, i added yellow to the reds (third slider, moving it to the right). finally, to make the reds stronger, i moved the last slider to the right (more black).

for the yellows, i made them brighter by adding white to them, thus making the tile wall and Paddington more bright as well.

for the cyans and the blues, i just added the maximum (+100) of black that i could.

i wanted for Paddington's nose to be brighter, so i added more white to the whites.

lastly, i added depth to the blacks by increasing their own blackness.

you should always play with the Selective Colors sliders for a bit, before deciding what you want or need. with time, you will automatically know what to change to correct the color grading. it all takes practice!

HUE/SATURATION

i don’t know if you noticed, but there are some green spots on the blue wall behind Paddington. to correct that, i added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (layer > new adjustment layer > hue/saturation) and made the saturation of the greens 0%, making that unwanted green disappear from the background.

while the green spots on the wall are specific for this gif, i use hue/saturation a lot to tweak, well, hue and saturation. sometimes someone’s skin is too yellow, i made it redder by tweaking the reds and the yellows, or vice-versa. the hue bar follows the rainbow bar, so the maximum settings (+100 and -100) give the selected color to change its hue to something more red or pink (the rainbow extremities). changing hue can give pretty whacky results, like turning someone’s skin tone to green, so you will need to play with it to get the hang of it. you can also tweak the opacity of your hue/saturation layer to further improve your gif’s coloring. i didn’t do it in this case, the opacity is still 100%. the reds and the blues had their saturation increased to make them pop just a bit more, without affecting the other colors.

COLOR BALANCE

the highlights of the gif still had a green tint to it due to the automatic correction of the Curves layer, so i used Color Balance. this is how it works: instead of giving specific colors some tints, you can give them to the shadows, highlights, and mid-tones. if your shadows are too blue, you counterbalance them with the opposite color, yellow. same thing with the cyan-red and magenta-green pairings. in my case, i added a bit of magenta.

B&W GRADIENT MAP

now, if this gif was a dish, it’s time for the salt and pepper. i always add a Gradient Map (layer > new adjustment layer > gradient map) (black to white gradient) with the Soft Light blending mode, thus giving my shadows more depth without messing with the mid-tones and highlights. it also doesn’t “deep fry” (you know those memes?) the gif too much by adding even more contrast. usually, the opacity of the layer is between 30% to 70%, it all depends on the gif. it always does wonders, though!

COLOR FILTER

finally, i like to add Color Filters (layer > new adjustment layer > color filter) to my gifs. it’s very handy when giving different scenes for the same minimalistic set because it makes them kind of match despite having completely different colors. in this gif’s case, i added a “deep blue” filter, opacity 50% density 25. you can change the density and the opacity of the layer for further editing, again, it all depends on the gif.

VIBRANCE

if i feel like it, i add a vibrance layer (layer > new adjustment layer > vibrance) to make the colors pop. this can ruin your coloring sometimes, especially when regarding skin color, so be careful. i didn't do it in this gif because i felt i didn't need it.

TA-DA! 🥳

AN OTHER EXAMPLE

the color grading of the original scene it’s pretty good as it is, to be honest. let’s see a worse scenario, a VERY yellow one:

no channel mixer this time because the automatic curves option dealt with the yellowness, but you can see it made the gif too green. i needed to correct that with the following adjustment layers:

curves (automatic option) (gif 2) >> same curves layer (tweaks) (gif 3) >> brightness & contrast (gif 4) >> hue/saturation (tweaked cyan+blue+green) >> selective color >> color balance (gif 5) >> b&w gradient map >> (sepia) filter >> vibrance (gif 6)

i added a hue/saturation layer to remove the blues & greens before my selective color layer because i thought that was more urgent than tweaking the tint of all colors. color balance (gif 4) was the real hero here, though, by removing the green tint. the selective color layer was meant to make the red pop more than anything else, because the rest looked pretty good, especially her skin tone (despite the green tint). you can notice that tweaking the curves layer (small gif 3) also helped A LOT with the green problem.

tl;dr 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

here's a list of my go-to's while coloring and lightning gifs. it's not a rule, just a guide. there are gifs in which i don't use all these adjustment layers, or use them in a different order. it all depends!

1. curves (automatic option + tweaks) 2. brightness & contrast 3. channel mixer 4. selective color 5. hue/saturation 6. color balance 7. b&w gradient map 8. color filter 9. vibrance

i'll suggest that you study each adjustment layer listed for more info, either with other Tumblr tutorials or YouTube ones. the YouTube ones focus on images, but you can translate what they teach to gif making very easily. you can ask me to further explain any adjustment layer, too! i was brief to keep this short (which i kinda failed lol).

feel free to ask me for clarification or something else about gifmaking wise, i always like to help. ❤️

[lucy-mclean]

hi sole! your sharpening is always so soft and pretty, i was wondering if you would be open to share it? hope you are having a wonderful november so far <3

Hi, Anon! Thank you so much <3 Yeah, sure, tutorial under the cut:

What you'll need:

Photoshop (I use Photoshop 2023)

Basic knowledge on how to make gifs

Camera Raw filter installed

Okay so, first of all, I use two different methods depending on the size of the gif. Let's start with the one I use for most of my gifsets which are big gifs (examples: x x x x.)

METHOD #1: Smart Sharpen + Camera Raw

I started using the Camera Raw filter last year and let me tell you, I'm obsessed! It completely changes the game of sharpening. I use this method for all gifs with a 540px width.

We're going to work on timeline so get your gif ready and convert it for smart filters. I'm using this scene from my last set as a base:

Here's the gif after I color it (I usually sharpen my gifs before I color them but for the sake of the tutorial I'm showing you this so you guys can see the difference):

(1) Smart Sharpen Layer: Let's start by adding a Smart Sharpen layer (Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen) with these settings:

Disclaimer: I didn't come up with these settings myself I got them from these sharpening actions forever ago so I don't know which one it is :/. I also wasn't able to find that person's new blog (if they even have one since they've been inactive since 2021) so if anyone knows please let me know and I'll give them proper credit!

Now we're going to go to the 'Layers' panel and click on this little thingy:

This window will pop up and we are going to change the Opacity to 50%.

(2) Camera Raw Filter: Here's where the fun begins. Go to Filter and click on Camera Raw Filter (you'll need to have the plugin installed for it to show up.) I don't know how the Camera Raw window will look like the first time you open it but good thing you only need to change a couple of things!

If it isn't opened yet click on 'Effects' and we're going to change the Texture and Clarity:

Depending on the scene/show/film I'm giffing, or if I want a stronger or softer sharpening, I'll use two different settings, but 99% of the time they are these:

First setting: Texture (+20) Clarity (+10)

Second setting: Texture (+40) Clarity (+20)

As you can see the difference isn't huge but the first setting gives a "softer" look. As I said I'll use one or the other depending on how I see the scene (it's almost always about the vibes yk.)

Feel free to experiment with these two and see what works best for you (although I wouldn't go higher than 40 on texture because the sharpening will look too fake imo.)

Also this filter is soooo good at making low quality videos look 1080p! Every time I've had to use 720p videos the Camera Raw filter has saved me 🫡

METHOD #2: Smart Sharpen

I use this method for smaller gifs. For example, 8 gifs of 268px x 180px sets (like these) or small-ish gifs in complex sets (like the second gifs in this set.)

This process is much simpler since it's the one I explained before but without adding the Camera Raw filter. That's it that's the method. Just a Smart Sharpen layer with the Opacity turned down to 50%.

As I said this method looks best on smaller gifs but to be honest it looks good on big gifs too? Depends on what you like most!

Anyway I hope this was easy to follow and if anyone has any questions please feel free to dm me or send an ask! ♡

[antoniosvivaldi]

Rotoscoping Tutorial by @antoniosvivaldi​​

Hi everyone! I’m excited to announce my long-delayed Rotoscoping Tutorial - requested by a number of people over the past calendar year. 

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create the cutout gifs like this (and seen in most of my gifsets under this tag) with Rotoscoping on After Effects. I’ll also provide additional examples and a number of things that I do to optimise my giffing / Rotoscoping workflow (e.g. useful shortcuts & other things to be aware of).

This is the structure of the tutorial:

Why Rotoscoping? Photoshop video timeline’s limitations

Photoshop workflow pt 1: Preparing your gif

After Effects workflow: Interface, shortcuts, and Rotoscoping tools

Photoshop workflow pt 2: Assembling your gif; with multiple examples

Bonus content: Rotoscoping tips* & workarounds to common issues

For quick reference, here are example gifsets (and where Rotoscoping is used in the posts) that I will mention in the tutorial:

Example 1: Cutout gif effect | panels 2 + 4

Example 2: Changing a gif’s background colour | all panels

Example 3: Cutout gif effect in a shape | all panels

Example 4: Putting it all together | panels 1, 3, & 5

What you need & need to know:

Software: Photoshop & After Effects (After Effects 2021 or later for Rotobrush 2.0)*

Hardware: 16GB RAM required to run later versions of AE*

Difficulty: Advanced; Knowledge in making gifs, applying layer masks, and using video timeline interface assumed

Key concepts: Rotoscoping (AE) / Video Timeline (AE+ PS) / Layer Masks & Groups (PS)

Supplementary files: tutorial resources

*I’m currently running the latest version of PS & AE on an M2 Mac, but I’ve also used older versions (CC 2015 & 2020) on Intel-based Macs. I’ll outline some known compatibility & performance issues, and workarounds later in this tutorial that could help streamline your giffing workflow.

Tutorial under the cut. Like / Reblog this post if you find this tutorial helpful. Linking this post / the example gifsets in your post caption, will be greatly appreciated if you read this to create effects seen in Examples 3 + 4.

1) Why Rotoscoping?

My Rotoscoping journey is motivated by the shortcomings on Photoshop - namely the limited options to manipulate the Layer Mask keyframes in the video timeline interface, as well my need to gif more efficiently.

Suppose I want to cutout this subject or recolour the background of a gif on Photoshop: I personally classify the gifs that I prepare on PS into 3 types based on the motion of the subject

These are the common Photoshop-only approaches when attempting to mask the subject in the gif.

Case 1: minimal motion in the subject → a simple layer mask will do the trick

Case 2: some linear panning of the subject in the gif → using the Layer Mask Position keyframes in the video timeline interface will do the trick

Case 3: subject moves around a lot (e.g. zoom motion) → Unfortunately this is where a Photoshop-only workflow will require frame by frame masking. Layer Mask Position keyframes only apply positional translation (but not transformation / rotation) on the layer mask

Enter Rotoscoping on After Effects: Instead of resigning to frame by frame procedure on Photoshop, I opted to make my life easier by learning to Rotoscope on After Effects. This essentially provides me an opportunity to cutout / recolour a wider range of gifs with relative ease.

2) Photoshop pt. 1: Preparing your gif

Prepare your gif the usual way - whether you screencap or import frames from video.

Then your Photoshop should look like this:

Now, I shall walkthrough & explain my personal giffing workflow (as of 2023) after loading the gif frames. To speed up the process, import my gif prep action file to Photoshop.

Going to Window > Action, you’ll see a set of actions under the “gif prep” folder. 

"set frame delay for timeline” (highlighted in yellow) will set all of your entire gif’s frame delay to 0.03s

“convert to timeline“ (highlighted in red) will take you to the Video Timeline interface

To play an action, press on the Play button (highlighted in green)

i. Set the frame delay of the entire gif to 0.03s. (play “set frame delay for timeline” from my gif prep action pack)

I work with everything in 0.03s frame delay (or equivalently 30fps) at first. It’s always possible to change the frame delay of the final gif to 0.05s before uploading onto Tumblr.   

ii) Convert this gif to a Smart Video Layer (play “convert to timeline” from my action pack)

Note: I personally don’t resize the gif just yet. That’s because Rotoscoping in full video resolution will render higher quality details around the edges as well as more flexibilities later on in the editing process.

Performance optimisation: If your computer has 8GB of RAM or less, you might find it helpful to crop / resize your gif to Tumblr dimensions now for a less sluggish performance in After Effects later on. 

(I have giffed on a desktop with 8GB of RAM and it’s quite slow at rendering individual frames of a 1080p short clip on AE)

iii) Add colouring adjustments on the gif. This will save you A LOT of time when you Rotoscope gifs that are originally very dark / poorly lit (e.g. the uncoloured Taylor Swift gif shown just above). 

If you usually colour your gifs at the very end of your giffing process (i.e. after sharpening), this will be a bit of a change.Nevertheless I still highly recommend adding some base colourings now to at least increase the contrast between the subject and the background.

iv) To minimise lagging on After Effects, simplify this gif file as follows: 

Flatten / Unsmart this gif file back to frame animation mode: play “flatten” (highlighted in red) from my gif prep action pack

Set the frame delay to 0.03s: play “set frame delay for timeline” (highlighted in green)

Convert the simplified gif file back to the video timeline interface: play “convert to timeline” (highlighted in yellow)

After “unsmarting” and converting back to the video timeline, your interface should look like this

And voila! This gif PSD is now ready to be imported to After Effects for Rotoscoping work!

3) After Effects: Interface and useful shortcuts

Open After Effects and Import (Cmmd / Ctrl + I) your gif PSD that you’ve just prepared.

After importing your gif PSD to After Effects, the interface should look like this. 

In the screenshot below, there are two compositions: the imported gif (highlighted in green) & another composition file made from selecting the imported gif (highlighted in red)

For the rest of the workflow, we will edit from the clone composition (the one highlighted in red), so select this one.

Before we take our plunge into the Rotoscoping, here are a few useful shortcuts to remember. I’ll explain the Roto Brush tool in the next section.

Preview the previous: fn + up arrow

Preview the next frame: fn + down arrow

Add to Roto Brush selection: holding Shift while you’re using the Roto Brush Tool

Subtract from Roto Brush selection: holding Alt while you’re using the Roto Brush Tool

Change Roto Brush size: while holding Cmmd / Ctrl, click + drag your mouse left / right

4) After Effects: The Rotoscoping Process

To access the Rotoscoping tools, click on the Roto Brush icon (highlighted in red in the screenshot below)

Then you’ll get the following dropdown options with two Rotoscoping Tools

Roto Brush Tool: This is where you add / subtract your Rotoscoping selection in your composition

Refine Edge Tool: Paint around the edge of your selection for more refined edges. Very helpful for Rotoscoping fuzzy edges / hairs

To make some Rotoscoping selection, first grab the Roto Brush Tool and click on the subject you want to cut out from your composition. 

When you’re Rotoscoping you’ll see this in the Effect Controls panel. 

There are two versions of Roto Brush:

Version 2.0: The Rotoscoping selection is powered by AI for higher accuracy when you propagate the frames. 

Version 1.0 (Classic): This is the legacy Roto Brush Tool that uses a lesser algorithm. Recommended only if Roto Brush 2.0 is unstable on your machine due to RAM issues.

And two quality settings for Roto Brush 2.0:

Standard

Best

Note: I am currently unable to use Roto Brush 2.0 with Best quality model on my machine to compare the differences myself, so I’ll link this page that explains the two quality settings.

Note: if you’re using an older version of After Effects you’ll see this instead. This corresponds to Roto Brush 1.0 / Classic in the newer versions of AE.

When you’ve made a selection using the Roto Brush Tool, you’ll see the pink lines around the subject. This is the region that you’ve selected to Rotoscope!

To bring out some details around the edges, grab the Refine Edge Tool and paint around the edges

Then the interface will look like this

To view the Rotoscoping selection that you’ve made more intuitively, you could click on the following buttons.

Personally I like the viewing my selection using Toggle Alpha (the second box from the left) & Toggle Alpha Boundary (the 3rd box from the left)

Toggle Alpha

Toggle Alpha Boundary

Note: If you aren’t happy with the initial Roto Brush selection, you can always add (press Shift while using the Roto Brush Tool) / subtract (press Alt / Option using the Roto Brush Tool) your selection.

After you’re happy with your Rotoscoping selection in the first frame of your composition, press fn + down to view the next frame.

Repeat pressing fn + down and fix the selection along the way (e.g. I subtracted a small area from my Rotoscoping selection with the Roto Brush tool to make the edge look cleaner).

After fixing the selection along the way, go back to the composition file (select the clone composition again) and you will see that a cutout gif is made!

To export this, go to File > Export > Add to Render Queue. You’ll be redirected to the Render Queue panel at the bottom of After Effects. 

Highlighted in red: click to change export setings

Highlighted in green: click to change save destination

Highlighted in yellow: click to render video

To preserve the transparency of your cutout gif, you need to change your export settings in the Output Module. 

Under the Video Output section, change your Channels to RGB + Alpha. Press OK. Then Render the video.

5) Photoshop pt. 2: Assembling your final gif

The essence is to drag the cutout gif (aka the video file that you’ve just rendered on AE) into a new PSD composition file. This will be where you’ll do the rest of your giffing. Your workflow will contain the follow steps:

Make a new blank PSD composition file in Tumblr dimensions

Enable the Video Timeline

Follow the instructions detailed in the individual examples i.e. drag the cutout gif into the PSD & adjust the timeline start / end points

Exporting the final gif. If you’ve worked in 0.03s frame delay all the way up to here, just play the action that I’ve provided in the tutorial in the following order to set the frame delay to 0.05s.

EXAMPLE 1: finalising your cutout gif | sample gifset

After enabling the Video Timeline in your PSD composition file you’ll see something like this

Go to your folder, drag the cutout gif you’ve made on After Effects, resize / reposition, then press Enter. 

And also make sure to adjust the Video Timeline’s start / end values.

Add some finishing touches. Because I did the Rotoscoping at full HD resolution, I’ll also need to sharpen my gif in this step.

After you’re happy, you can export this into a gif file and do what you usually do to change the frame delay to 0.05s. 

Notes on my “Unsmarting” approach:

To prevent accidentally writing over a PSD composition file that I’ve spent time editing, I personally render this into a short video (File > Export > Render Video) and use the following export settings (to prevent quality loss)

Then I open the rendered clip and play the actions in my gif prep action pack as follows:

flatten: this “Unsmarts” the clip / video

set frame rate: this sets all frames to have 0.05s frame delay

This is the final interface that I get before I pull up the Save For Web window.

EXAMPLE 2: changing your gif’s background colour (for Case 3 gifs) | sample gifset

From your folder, drag BOTH the cutout gif (rendered on AE) and the original gif to your blank composition. 

Important: you need to make sure that both layers are properly lined up in the composition file (i.e. selecting both layers when repositioning / resizing)

 On Photoshop, press Enter twice and place the cutout gif on top of the original gif from the Layers panel. Then you should get something like this

Select both layers and resize / reposition them in your PSD composition until you’re satisfied with the placements.

The basic idea here is to add some adjustment layers / other things in between the cutout gif and the original gif. To do this, select the original gif layer in the Layers panel.

Then you can start adding.a bunch layers e.g. textures, onto the composition.

And then here’s the exported gif!

6) Fancier Rotoscoping examples

Note: knowledge in using layer masks / groups and making shape / text layers assumed

In the next two examples, I’ll show you how to combine the two previous examples with shape / text layers.

EXAMPLE 3: Placing your cutout gif into a shape / text layer | sample gifset

Add a text / shape layer to your blank PSD composition

We want to prepare a masked group so in the Layers panel:

Make selection from layer: Cmmd / Ctrl + Click (highlighted in red)

Make a new group: click on the folder icon (in yellow)

Create layer mask: click on the icon (in green)

After duplicating the masked group you’ll get something like this in the Layers panel

Drag your cutout gif into the PSD composition

Place the cutout gif into the masked group on top

Select the mask of the top group and paint (in white) over the region you want to reveal for the cutout gif

Add some finishing touches & export the gif!

EXAMPLE 4: Putting it all together | sample gifset

You follow the same approach as in Example 3 to prepare the masked groups, but you need to drag two gif layers in (and resize them using the approach outlined in Example 2)

Place the gif layers as follows

While selecting the mask of the group on top, paint (in white) over the region that you want to reveal in the cutout gif

Now select the original gif (placed within the other group) and add some adjustment layers

After adding some finishing touches & exporting the gif, I get this!

Note: you can do even more overlay effects in the background portion of example 4. There will just be more masked groups + adjustment layers

7) Bonus: Some useful Rotoscoping / giffing lifehacks

GIFFING LIFEHACKS:

— Use best quality footage that you could find & Rotoscope in full video resolution, for better details around the edges

— Poorly lit scenes & low contrast edges are harder to Rotoscope (e.g. Toy Story set / TS evermore set).

If you’re new to AE, I would recommend choosing videos with well-lit gifs with simpler backgrounds and high contrast edges (e.g. Maisie Peters Cate’s Brother set)

— Use Rotobrush 2.0 if you’re using After Effects 2021 or later. It’s more difficult to Rotoscope / change background colour for gifs with a lot of movements with the classic Rotobrush tool. If the scene is tricky, you might want to switch to the “Best” quality model.

HARDWARE-RELATED PERFORMANCE OPTIMISATION:

— The recent versions of Photoshop require at least 8GB of RAM. If you have less RAM, it will still work provided you have enough scratch disk space. For better performance, it’s best to close other applications when you’re using Photoshop.

— The recent versions of After Effects require at least 16GB of RAM. If your machine has less RAM than this, there are some workarounds to prevent your machine from hanging: 

Essential: close other applications that you’re running on your computer

Resize your gif down to Tumblr dimensions & sharpen it before importing to After Effects.

Install an older version of AE 

8) Bonus: Some known software + hardware issues, and workarounds

KNOWN ISSUES ON PHOTOSHOP:

I currently have minimal issues in my giffing workflow, but I’ll nevertheless outline a few common known Photoshop issues for anyone who needs some workarounds.

— Video Timeline interface missing: this affects Apple Silicon Macs (i.e. M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max / M1 Ultra / M2 / M2 Pro / M2 Max)

Update to newer version of Photoshop (updated 2022 or 2023)

Open Photoshop with Rosetta

— Scratch disk full error: This is a common issue with machines that lack RAM & have nearly used up internal storage. Editing video layers in the timeline interface uses a lot of memory hence will require a lot of scratch disk space. 

Make sure that you have enough free storage space while using Photoshop. Alternatively you can use an external hard drive as a scratch disk.

KNOWN ISSUES ON AFTER EFFECTS:

These are a few issues that I have personally ran into over the course of giffing on multiple devices & multiple versions of After Effects.

Note: Inputs from M1 / M2 Mac users with regards to experiences on using the After Effects Rotoscoping tools are welcome!

— Rotobrush 2.0 set to “Best” quality model causes AE to crash: this affects anyone who’s using MacOS Ventura

I’m currently experiencing this issue on my M2 Mac. The workaround right now is to change the Roto Brush 2.0 quality setting to Standard. 

This is due to some software compatibility issues on Adobe’s side specifically with MacOS Ventura. Fingers crossed that they will properly fix this bug in the future updates!

— Cannot re-open project files with Rotoscoping: this affects anyone using the initial release of After Effects 2020 (I had installed this on an Intel-based machine and it sucked)

The only option here is to update to a later version of After Effects.

8) More useful Rotoscoping resources

Rotoscoping + Keyframes Tutorial by @jenna--ortega​

Rotoscoping + Masking Tutorial by @usergif​

Rotoscoping For Beginners in After Effects | Motion Graphics Tutorial

I hope you enjoy reading this! If you have any questions / need any help related to this tutorial, feel free to send me an ask!

[undertalethingems]

Heya! I was thinking of making my own comic, and I was curious what app you used to make comics, and if you had any tips.

Anonymous asked: What program do you use to draw? (cant remember if this was already asked or not, sorry if it was)

It has been asked, but not in quite a while, so no worries ^^

I used to use photoshop, but it was an old version that stopped working when i got my newest computer, so I've switched to using clip studio paint. it works pretty much the same, so very little of my workflow had to change, which was nice.

i'm sure most other art programs out there would work just as well though; about the most specialized things i use in clip are some of the brushes--i don't even touch any of the tools that are supposed to help with making comics specifically XD

edit: oops, i forgot to answer the bit about tips for making comics

first off, start small. unexpected guests is not my first comic, and what i learned from past--even failed--attempts has helped me get as far as i have. doing a few short comics will help you get a sense for how to block out panels, how long it takes to draw a page, and how it feels to draw the same characters all the time. Project management is a whole other skillset, but it's important to learn if you want to take on bigger works.

I also recommend studying your favorite comics to understand how they achieved what you like about them. I've mentioned before how the manga Fullmetal Alchemist has been a huge inspiration for much of my work, and sometimes when I'm stuck I'll revisit it to see how its author handled action, how she paced scenes by changing the paneling layout, and so on.

these are far from the only things to know about making comics, but they're the tips that first jumped to my mind, so i hope they help at least a little ^^;

[comicaurora]

Hi! I finally got the chance to read Aurora a bit ago. It's a wonderful story--all I was expecting and better! I was particularly amazed and delighted by the artwork and visual mechanics used to tell the story, so I wrote a post to yell about how cool it is and break some of it down. (No criticism, just praise.) I'm mostly a hobbyist, so I'm hoping I've done it justice.

That said: zero pressure to read it or respond to this ask. Normally I wouldn't send it since I tagged, but I know Tumblr's notifs are a mess and things get lost very easily. I've been in both the "one (1) word of praise will feed me for a year" and the "oh gods don't talk about my writing/art because anything that seems Off will break my brain" modes before, and I absolutely don't want to push or make you uncomfortable!

If you are comfortable, however, I wanted to ask about your use of what I'm assuming are Screen and blending modes in sound effect words. (I'm only guessing that's the technique, though, so I could be totally wrong about how it's done! I'm mostly experienced in image manipulation in Photoshop.) Making them semi-transparent over the actions is genius :) What inspired you to do that, and are there specific techniques you use to make it work?

Same questions go for using specific colors to distinguish different characters' words and actions. I really noticed it in the cave sequence with Falst and Dainix, since their colors are so vivid in the dark (ex. Falst's little swats and Dainix's swooping kick at 1.20.9). It lends excellent clarity to busy scenes.

Thanks! Have a lovely day, enjoy your break, and happy holidays <3

You're correct about the technique! "Screen" is the blend mode I use most often for sound effects. I stumbled on it mostly through trial and error - I love how sound effects add depth to a comic panel, but it's very easy for them to obscure the art in a way I find counterproductive, so "Screen" lets me put the sound effect directly over the origin of the sound while still letting it be visible through the word. Early chapters didn't have it as much-

Most of the sound effects in early chapters are just solid colors with reduced opacity if I'm feeling fancy. But I started figuring it out around chapter 8 and 9, because Falst is kind of a sound-effect-heavy guy, especially in his fight scenes.

In order to make sure they don't impede the visibility of the action, I'll often soft-erase the top or bottom half of the SFX to reduce its opacity while still leaving it readable.

I'll usually double that up with an outline on the SFX so it's still readable. This is an especially important consideration if the SFX goes over an area of the background that's very bright or glowing.

Color-coding the speed lines and SFX to the character or force causing them isn't a hard and fast rule, but I like using it (in part because it's a habit from the OSP illustrations, where every character has a single pop of color in their lineart) mostly because it sort of codes every sound to make it clear where it's emanating from, or the general feeling of the sound. Since I normally do character-colors for SFX, something like this stands out more jarringly-

Which it's supposed to, but a big lightning strike doesn't register as anything too worrying because it's just Tess up to her usual shenanigans.

It's also very useful for magic effects, because each form of magic has its own associated palette.

And when I had a very complicated fight scene in a dark environment, I used the texture pattern I'd already made for the monster to color its SFX, so when I Screened them onto the panels they didn't obscure too much while still communicating "this is something else."

Changing the weight, lined-vs-not-lined, and opacity of the SFX words also helps to communicate that not every sound has the same feeling. A strong motion is solid and aggressive, but a crackling, unstable sound is more ephemeral and staticky.

It's definitely been a process of learning as I go - looking back at the earlier chapters I can actually see when I first tried various tricks I now use regularly, like doubling and distorting an SFX to produce the effect of a camera-shaking impact. I haven't really seen any other comics that do it like I do, probably because most other comics follow a more traditional production pipeline where text bubbles and sound effects get locked into the composition early, before the inking stage, because traditional physical comics don't have digital-art layers to play with. Adding sound effects to a page is almost the last thing I do before exporting them, and that only works because digital art and layers allow for a ton of flexibility.

[colleendoran]

Neil Gaiman's CHIVALRY: From Illuminated Manuscripts to Comics

One of the many reasons I wanted to adapt Neil Gaiman's Chivalry into graphic novel form was to create a comic as a bridge and commentary re: comics and illuminated manuscripts.

We're often told that the first comic book was Action Comics #1 featuring Superman, a collection of Superman comic strips that morphed into comic books as an art form.

Sequential art predates Action Comics #1.

Action Comics popularized sequential art book storytelling that had already appeared in other forms in fits and starts throughout history. Comic books didn't take off as a popular medium for several reasons, not least of which was the necessary printing process hadn't been invented yet and it's hard to popularize - and commercialize - something most people can never see. 

You find sequential art in cave paintings and in Egyptian hieroglyphics. I've read that comics (manga) were invented by the Japanese in 12th century scrolls.

And sequential art appears over and over again in Western art going back well over 1000 years, and in book form at least 1100 years ago.

The most obvious example of early sequential art in Western art - as a complete narrative in sequence - is the Bayeux Tapestry. 

At 230 feet long, this embroidered length of cloth was likely commissioned around the year 1070 by Bishop Odo, brother of William the Conqueror. It depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the invasion of England by the Normans. (The tapestry was made in England, not in France, but it is called the Bayeux tapestry because that's where it is now.)

Imagine what a task it was to embroider this thing. Whew. And you thought it was hard learning Photoshop.

This work of art is important in the history of sequential narrative, but the Norman invasion is also important to the legend of King Arthur - and another important English legend - for reasons we'll get into later. 

It's complicated.

All this is why you see this art in the background of this page of Chivalry.

Using the Romanesque art style of the tapestry in panel 1, I've added the Latin phrase "Rex Quondom, Rexque Futurus" - "The Once and Future King", the final words of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur as inscribed on King Arthur's tomb, and the title of T.H. White's famous Arthurian novel.  (EDIT) and it has been kindly pointed out to me that QUONDOM should be QUONDAM, which is hilarious and annoying and this is how history gets rewritten by accident.

My original intention was to draw this Bayeux Tapestry scene out and juxtapose it with shots of Galaad interacting with the children, but the two page sequence I imagined didn't really work as well in reality as it did in my head. 

Foremost among my concerns was that the tapestry reference might be too obscure for most readers. I wanted to weave the visual meta-text of Chivalry into the story (For further reading on this project and my use of visual meta-text, symbolism, and history in Neil Gaiman's Chivalry, go HERE. And HERE. And HERE. And Yet again HERE.) in such a way as it would enhance the experience for people who "got" the visual meaning, while not dragging things down for people who didn't. So I cut this scene down to one panel.

The tapestry is a complete, long form comic strip created over 1100 years before some people claim comics were invented. So, I loved being able to reference it here.

But even more interesting to me are the sequential art sequences that appear in illuminated manuscripts - comics in book form.

I once got into a rather vicious argument with an academic who insisted illuminated manuscripts were comics. I said no. She said yes. Then she insulted the lowly comic artist and blocked me on Facebook.

Whatever.

My point was not that you can't find sequential art in illuminated manuscripts. My point is that an illustrated book isn't de facto a comic. Most illuminated manuscripts are illustrated books. Some illuminated manuscripts contain sequential art.

Just because opera is music, that doesn't mean all music is opera.

Just because comics books are books that doesn't mean all books are comic books.

And just because some illuminated manuscripts contain sequential art, that doesn't mean all illuminated manuscripts are sequential art.

But one is.

Let me show you it.

One of the earliest examples of an illuminated manuscript with comic art is The Bible d'Etienne Harding which you can see in this really bad jpg here, sorry, best I could find.

Created around the year 1109, property of a French Cistercian monk, it combines sequences like this with pages of text and illustration.

Not a comic book IMHO, but an illuminated manuscript with sequences of text, illustration and sequential narrative.

It's no more a "comic book" than a newspaper is for having text, illustration, and comic strips in it.

IMHO, academic lady.

And here's a look at the Old English Hexateuch (hexateuch refers to the first 6 books of the Bible) which I think is far more visually complex and interesting work, and comes much closer to the illuminated manuscript as comic, but still intersperses large sequences of text and illustration with sequential storytelling sequences. So I don't consider it a comic, but a book with sequential work in it.

Now this work below is a different matter. This is from the Holkham Bible Picture Book, circa about 1330.

This thing is genius. It measures a little larger than a modern comic, around 8"x11", and almost every page of it is like this spread here. 231 pages of beautifully rendered art, with repeated use of banderoles - "speech scrolls"  (basically word balloons) -  and captions, and (mostly) real sequential art. I've never seen anything else that comes even close to it, and by all accounts, neither has anyone else. 

It may not be a modern comic book - but it's a comic book as far as I can tell. I don't think there's any other illuminated manuscript that is as complete, sophisticated, and innovative a sequential storytelling work.

If this were printed and seen by more people, the comic book medium would have taken off centuries earlier, IMHO. But it wasn't. It was tucked away in a monastery somewhere and few people ever saw it. It ended up being forgotten for centuries until it popped up again around 1816 when a banker sold it to an avid book collector, Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, who inherited Holkham Hall and its library and set about restoring and expanding it. 

The banker wrote, “a very curious MS. just brought here from the Continent. . . which I think one of the greatest curiosities I ever saw”.

Sequential art got invented over and over and over by one artist after another until one day centuries later, some teenaged boys found their newspaper strips gathered together in a cheap format, and suddenly comic books were popular and like new.

And then a lot of people who didn't seem to realize that books had had pictures in them for centuries got all up in arms about the harms of books with pictures in them.

I think it's funny that it is called the Holkham Bible Picture Book. There really was no "comic" art language when this work was created or when academics began to catalogue this sort of thing. Will they change the name now?

Who can say.

Anyway, another Holkham Bible Picture Book reference for you.

Look familiar?

I referenced it in this scene in Chivalry.

One of the fun things about the Holkham is that it opens with a discussion between a friar who has commissioned the work and the artist. The friar admonishes the artist to do a good job on the project because it will be shown to important people. And the artist responds, "Indeed, I certainly will and, if God lets me live, never will you see another such book."

He wasn't kidding.

You can see the entire manuscript HERE. 

Sponsored by my Patreon. Thank you.

[pink-vacancy]

Hi ^^

It’s me, the creator of some gifs you like and the creator of many gifs you could’ve probably lived without. A few people have asked me for a giffing tutorial recently so I have made one documenting my normal process! I’m going to gif this Aespa stage in this tutorial because I am still pretty bad at coloring stages. So come struggle along with me 🫶!

Step 1. Getting Sources & Vapoursynth

The worst enemy of the tumblr gifmaker is tumblr itself. You will spend your time making the clearest gif imagineable only for the blue site to reduce it to pixels. But alas, we must gif on. The best way to get good results is have a good source and to precompress your gif with vapoursynth.

As far as downloading from Youtube the best app to use is 4k Video Downloader. 4kVD let's you get download your file as a .mkv which is how youtube stores their 4k quality vids. Only limitation is on the free tier you get only 10 downloads. There are other more technically dubious methods to get 4kvids but I've literally never hit this limit.

10 out of 10 gifmakers agree if you want those good good crystal clear gifs you gotta stick with 4k or 1080p sources. Although if you are a complete sicko like me you can gif 720p and still get pretty good (not great) results.

So now you got your source video but you won't actually be able to open that bad boy up in PS yet. This is where the Vapoursynth step comes in. Vapoursynth will blast that footage into a nice denoised, sharpened and resized little baddie of a video clip for us.

To download VS and get a more in depth explanation of the exact steps on how to use it please reference this post. The basic steps of Vapooursynth are:

Drop your source video on the "vapourscript (drop a video file on me).bat" icon and type in the timestamps

Crop your gif to your liking (I do a lot of 540 x405 or 540x335 for horizontal gifs. 268x480 for vertical.)

Apply the sharpness and denoise (these are the options I use):

copy the code from the white box and paste it into the script like below

I set my denoiser to 1.5 and my sharpening to .5. (I stole this from @hyeongseo lol)

Go to Script > Encode Video. Make sure on this screen to name your file and set the header option to 'Y4M'. (Sometimes this is the step where it crashes and all your dreams are ruined because it can't convert it unfortunately. But 99% of videos are good lol)

You will find your Photoshop ready clip in gifs/output

Step 2. Photoshop

You are now good to open up your clip in Photoshop.

if we export our gif at this moment it will look like this:

Which isn't too bad. They just are pretty washed out and a lot of times at this step you'll see a lot of grain.

Sharpening (again lol) and Noise:

This might sound weird cause we just denoised lmao but stick with me.

We are going to convert our clip to a smart object. If you want to slow down or speed up your clip make sure to do so before converting.

(Often times if i have 60fps clip I put it at half speed, but if the action of the gif is really jerky or flashy at 30fps a lot of times I'll set it to 85% speed)

Convert your video to a smart object by right clicking it in the layers panel and selecting the "Convert to Smart Object" option

Create a copy of layer 1 and arrange it so it is aligned perfectly on top of the first video in the timeline. You have to drag it outside of the video group to do this. It should look like this once you are done:

On the bottom clip (layer 1), select filters -> sharpen -> smart sharpen. Apply the filter with these settings:

Then on the same clip (layer 1) apply the same smart sharpen filter with these settings

Setting up the Sharpness like this makes sure the finer details with stand out with crisp lines in the final product. (Look at how the mesh on her arms is in finer detail now)

Your video might look a little crispy at this point and that is ok cause we are going to soften that.

Now on our top video layer (layer 1 copy) select filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. Use this setting:

Finally apply filters-> Noise -> Add Noise to layer 1 copy with these settings

"Vacancy what the hell? It looks like shit now."

Yeah... But now we'll put layer 1 copy at 25% opacity and it will look less like the shit that it does look like right now I prommy. Here is the current output:

The idea behind all this blurring and adding noise is that it will help create smoother transitions between the colors of the gif and reduce large blotchy bands of pixels that can sometimes show up

PLEASE!!! Save your current step as a PSD file. You can skip having to apply all those filters and just drag the filter groups on to the layers after the smart object conversion step.

Step 3. Coloring

Now to the fun part! There is a lot of trial and error in this step since we only have 256 colors to play with.

Typically my goals for this step are:

Raise the black point (Make Giselle's outfit in this gif black so more color can be used on her hair, skin and the background.)

Reduce the overall contrast of the gif. (Darken the lightest lights if possible)

Saturate the colors enough so they stand out but not so much that everything looks gross.

Depending on how we do these steps we may need to subtract frames from the gif. (Which I hope not cause there is exactly 69 frames in the current version lol)

Here is an example of what my coloring difference can look like:

In this case the colored gif is actually smaller because I elminated a lot of the dark greys in the background.

Vacancy's Dumbass Original Recipe thing

This is probably the only thing different that I do from most creators

My first adjustment layer is usually a gradient map. The green and red one to be more specific.

I then change the blend mode to luminosity and set the opacity somewhere between 12 and 20% (Usually 15%).

This step brings all our shades closer together so we have more freedom with coloring later. Also when idols are very white wash this seems to bring out the shadows and skin tone better in later steps as well. If you overdo it though the person in the gif can wind up looking very orange or yellow so less is sometimes more here.

There's also probably a better way to achieve this but you know... oh well

My Other adjusment layers usually consist of:

Levels: With the gradient map applied you can darken the blackpoint of your gif pretty significantly.

Selective Color: This is the most useful adjustment layer. Make sure to expirement with adding to the black slider on the blacks and neutrals color options. Often times kpop vids are over exposed and darkening this can bring out a lot of unseen color.

Hue/Saturation: I use this layer to darken the blues of the background with the lightness slider as well. You can adjust individual colors with this layer and with selective color and that is a very powerful tool for coloring.

Start:

Finish:

Because I darkened the gif so much I was able to add around 6 frames!

Though I’m not 100% satisfied with this gif, this would be my process from the start. You can put those adjustment layers all in a group and save it to the psd as well to skip all the steps to apply them. I used all the same adjustment layers for the header gif of this post as well which saved me a lot of time ^^!

Since every video is different you usually have to play around with the sliders a lot between clips.

Step 4. It Flops…

Jk jk but it does happen a lot tho on this site so don’t get discouraged ☺️

Parting Notes

If you want a really nicely colored fancam to practice on I would see if MIRAI on YouTube has a fancam of your fave idol. Their videos are really nicely color balanced from the start where stages like this tend to be very bright.

I’ll probably make a follow up post with more coloring tips and my thought processes while making gifs but this is the very basics to making hq gifs hope you learned a lot.

You can always hit my dms or inbox with questions if you have them ^^!

[miwtual]

PHOTOPEA GLITCH TRANSITION TUTORIAL by kai @heroeddiemunson​​

howdy! so i’ve recently come to realize that i haven’t come across any tutorials for creating a glitch transition on photopea. as someone who has done this transition many times in photopea, i figured that i should create a tutorial to show how i personally do this effect!

what you need:

photopea (basically photoshop in your browser, completely free!)

basic giffing knowledge, because i won’t cover it in this tutorial (other tutorials: tutorial by @benoitblanc​​​​, tutorial by @ashleysolsen​​​​)

i also recommend watching this youtube video for a real time visual of what i’m going to be describing in this tutorial. this video is what taught me how to do this glitch effect, so if how i’m describing it is at all confusing, check out the video to see it in action!

without further ado, make sure you save your psds regularly and let’s begin the tutorial :)

step one: making your gifs

before we do anything, you have to first make the gifs that you are going to doing the glitch in between. for the sake of this tutorial, i will be transitioning between two gifs, but this tutorial works for however many gifs you want to glitch between for your edit. here are my two gifs that i will be transitioning between:

i highly recommend keeping these individual gifs small in their frame count to make sure your final gif doesn’t go over tumblr’s size limit. the gifs i am working with are both 22 frames; you dont have to make the gifs have the same amount of frames, but i do it because i think it looks cleaner.

with your two gifs, edit them however you would like. if you have a specific order you’d like the gifs to look/a way that your finished product will look like (ex: black and white with a transition to fully colored), then you should color them accordingly. here are what my gifs look like after fully editing them:

once you’re happy with your editing, go to file > export as > GIF and save your gifs. now that we have our gifs to transition between, let’s make our canvas!

step two: making your gifs’ canvas

now that we have the gifs we’re going to be transitioning between, we need to make a “canvas”, or place where we put these two gifs in order to transition between them. so, going to file > new…, create a new canvas. here are the specifications for my canvas (size of your canvas may vary, depending on your cropping for your gifs):

the background for this canvas doesn’t really matter like it does when you’re blending two gifs, but i still made my canvas’s background black because it contrasts the brightness of the gifs i’m placing onto it.

with your canvas now created after clicking “Create”, open up the two gifs that you will be transitioning between. right click the gif’s folder in the layers panel on the right, and select duplicate into… and choose the canvas you just created. once your gifs have been duplicated into the canvas, your layer panel should look something like this:

if you didn’t duplicate your gifs in order, arrange your gifs however you want them to appear. from here, we can now get to the purpose of the tutorial, creating the glitch effect!

step three: creating the glitch effect

generally, with any transition effect, i like to make my gifs seem like they are endlessly looping. while this is a little more work when it comes to giffing, i do think it gives the gifs a nice polish and doesn’t make it feel like there’s a harsh transition between the gif’s looping cycle.

click the eye next to your top most gif(s) in order to make it invisible, as we will worry about it later. scroll down to the layer titled “_a_frm0,50”, right click, and select “duplicate layer”. this should create a new layer, “_a_frm0,50 copy”, on top of the original layer. double click on the copy, and you should see this pop up:

below the fill slider, you should see something titled “channel” with three checkboxes with R, G, and B next to each checkbox. you can uncheck any one of these checkboxes for a different effect; unchecking the R box creates the stereotypical red/blue glitch effect, unchecking the G box creates a green/pink glitch effect, and unchecking the B box creates a blue/yellow glitch effect. for my transition, i have chosen to go with the blue/yellow glitch effect by unchecking the B box. however, you can play around with whatever effect you prefer for your gif.

once you have chosen what checkbox to uncheck, click “OK”. with the “_a_frm0,50 copy” still selected, make sure you have the move tool selected (the curser at the top of the left toolbar), and choose the direction you want your glitch to go and move the layer using the arrow keys on your keyboard. it can move as much or as little as you want, whatever looks good to you! i chose to move this first layer 10 clicks to the left and 5 clicks up, which creates this effect for my first layer:

which looks cool, right? now, you could stop here with the glitch effect, but me being me, i’m extra, so i’m going to include the next half-step that you don’t have to follow unless you want to.

step 3.5: the glitch effect, advanced

with “_a_frm0,50 copy” still selected, go to the left toolbar and find the rectangle select tool (right under the move tool from before). this part is a bit tedious, but i like the results, so i feel that the work is worth it.

using the rectangle select tool, make a shape around part of the layer, and then go back to your toolbar and select the move tool again so we can move the selected section. do you remember how many clicks you used to move your layer and in what direction it goes in? well, now, do the opposite; since i moved 10 clicks to the left and 5 clicks up, my selected section needs to go 10 clicks right and 5 clicks down. below is what this looks like before and after moving the selected area:

once you’re happy with the moved selection, go to the top bar and go to select > deselect so that you are no longer selecting the section you just moved. repeat this step however many times you like; i tend to do this about 5 times for each layer of varying sizes/lengths to allow variety. here is what the final product looks like for this first layer:

and viola! your fully glitched layer one. now we can move on with the rest of the tutorial.

step three, continued: creating the glitch effect

now that you have finished this layer, make sure you have selected both frames “_a_frm0,50” and “_a_frm0,50 copy” by left clicking while holding down CTRL on your keyboard. with both layers selected, right click and choose the “merge layers” option in the popup; this ensures that the glitch effect that you have created stays as one frame.

now we get to do this many more times! make your next layer, “_a_frm1,50”, visible by clicking the little box next to it in the layer panel, and repeat the before steps. i personally alternate between what direction my glitches go in to add more variety and interest for my gifs. so, for example, with my “_a_frm0,50” frame, i moved it 10 clicks to the left and 5 clicks up; this means, for “_a_frm1,50”, i’m going to move it 10 clicks to the right and 5 clicks down, so on and so forth.

i do this for the first 3 frame layers and the last 3 frame layers for both gifs. when your gifs are finished with their individual gif transitions, they should (individually) look like this:

and together, they should look something like this:

and that’s the hard part done! congratulations, you just made a glitch transition!

step four: finishing touches

now, this entire step is optional, as if you already did stuff like add text to the individual gifs you are using this transition with, you’re probably already done. however, if you’re like me and you’re making a gif where the text remains stationary on top as the gif itself transitions underneath, take this time now to do so.

i will also note that if you want your gif transition to match with the rest of your gifs, you can do that in this layer. for example, i want the blue in the transition to be purple like in the rest of my gif; to accomplish this, i will use a combination of a hue/saturation layer and a selective color layer to make the blue be purple (which does change the purple a little from how it was originally, but i don’t mind). i would put these layers on top of both of my gif layers so that the transition layers in both gifs get the same coloring. doing so creates this effect:

(that isn’t a step that’s required by any means (nor do i do it all the time), but in case you wanted to do that, now you know!)

now that i am fully happy with how the gif looks, i will add my finalized text and end up with this as my final product:

now, if you run into the problem of your gif being a little too large for tumblr’s size limit (for example, my finished gif was 10.7MB, and the limit for 540x540 gifs is 10MB) and don’t want to redo all of the process of doing the glitch effect after deleting some frames, i recommend using ezgif’s gif optimizer. it helps shrink the size of your gif without costing you the quality of your gifs. :) i dont normally recommend that for other types of gifs where it’s easier to delete frames, but in this case i know that deleting frames and having to recreate the glitch effect may be annoying!

other than that, this is the end of the tutorial — congrats, you know how to make a glitch transition in photopea! good for you! :) if you ever need any help with photopea, or have a request for how i have done an effect, please feel free to shoot me an ask and i’ll do my best to explain or make another tutorial to help!

[randomyuu]

so hold my hand (consign me not to darkness) [1/4]

Ah, yes. The fic that made me realise I’m in desperate need of Cursed Spirit Gojou in my ever-growing favourite GoYuu tropes.

Content Warning!

Major Character Death. Other characters are disrespectful to the corpse.

I highly suggest you read the fic first, or just the fic, since I don’t think I was properly able to adapt it into drawings. While I managed to use roughly two weeks of on-and-off planning, researching, and storyboarding, I only had a full week to finish it. You can read more of my thoughts below the comic if you’re curious.

Title: so hold my hand (consign me not to darkness)

Author: qalb_al_louz

It’s ongoing, and as of this drawing, the fic is in its third chapter. While this is (sexually) SFW, always be mindful of the tags! Please keep yourself safe and sound.

Please read from right to left, and enjoy!

You can only upload 30 images in one post, huh Damn, I gotta divide it into parts

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Alrighty, I'll put my watered down unhinged thoughts below. No extra drawings down there if you're curious haha (unless you want to see the storyboard and the characters' full body character sheet, lemme know). You can skip the stuff underneath the Keep Reading for all parts.

This fic had me grinning from ear to ear every time I read this. The atmosphere, how it goes from POV to POV—of pure fear and panic—and the peak excitement I got when Yuuji properly meets Gojou, like brooooo 😭

Gosh I cannot emphasise how much I love this fic. I’ve always been wanting to make a whole comic out of it, especially since it was 2 chapters and it doesn’t look like the author will update it, but it just… kind of forgotten ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿

But then the author posted a new chapter and I told myself this is a sign I should really start.

also goddamn I was so naive to think I can tackle 2 chapters as comic—no I was in fact cannot

The moment I laid my eyes on the first paragraph, things were portrayed very vividly in my mind. The panel, the angle, Gojou's head rolling down... I was like, hell yeah. Then I continued reading and I finally succumbed to my desire to draw this out.

At first I want to adapt this into a vertical format like those manhwas. However the longer I try to learn and storyboard it... I am simply not yet comfortable with it, especially for such a big project. Even the 1st storyboard starts vaguely vertical before the panels quickly crammed into that B4-B5 format lol. The first sketch estimated 69 (heh) pages for 90% of chapter 1. I said "no" for my own sanity and fully focused on the usual manga format and it was narrowed down to 60. Still a lot though, quantity and time-wise. So with a heavy heart, I can only do the majority of chapter 1 :”) I really really want to draw Sukuna talks back to Gojou—do you have any idea how good that scene was??? Gojou tried so hard to restrain himself, he’s so other I love him 😭

Due to the sheer length of this comic (I'm still in disbelief), I have limit lots of things, and that includes the drawing. If you've seen my other JJK fanarts, they are more rendered than this one. Well, this one is purely sketched with the help of the eraser to tidy up some lines. This is also the first fanart that I did purely on Photoshop, so I can control the typesets and drawings in one place. Usually, I use Photoshop for panels and typesetting and Krita for drawing.

I don't really like Photoshop's brush, but it did really well in curbing my perfectionist tendencies, so that's good.

It's also been quite a while since I draw in general (sobs) so... yeah, you might find differences, or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But I hope you enjoy it nonetheless!

I know setting is important, but maaan I genuinely won't miss rereading chapter 83-93 with a heavy focus on background and character locations. I just want to read the action and dialogue😭 However continuity is really important. But my spatial intelligence is almost non-existent even GPS sometimes can't help me. All I'm saying is that if you find some silly drawing mistakes, do forgive me ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿I only drew all this in a week because otherwise I won't have another chance to complete this.

Well, lots of things I won't miss from this project, but haha let's talk about the characters instead because holy shit what was I thinking, starting this year drawing this many characters in the same project??? I have never drawn anyone here except for Yuuji, Gojou, Nanami and Megumi. I don't think I've ever drawn older Getou before. I already forgot how to draw my boy Yuuji and I gotta draw all these people???

This is what you call making a bad decision, kids. Don't do your "drawing warmup" after months of not drawing and tackling a project of a scale way bigger than you've ever tackled before.

Thank you for reading this far! I hope you find my complaint entertaining! But make no mistake, I genuinely still love the fic. Drawing this, even with all the headaches it gave me, only makes me adore this fic even more.

Thank you very much to each one of you who follows and leaves comments and tags on my silly art—it never failed to make my day :D And I sincerely wish this one also made your day or even made your minute! I'll see you in the next part!

[animalcrossingshowdown]

someone sent in this ask and I spent literal hours putting together this tutorial but then it wouldn't let me post it and when I went back into my inbox the ask was gone?? good thing I copy and pasted it, so here it is in its own post

I'm not sure if this will work with programs other than photoshop, but this is how I do it. I know @shinobi-bacon has a tutorial here on how they do it which is pretty different from the way I do it, so if my tutorial is confusing maybe theirs will click with you better lmao. I stole the greenscreen idea from them anyway

SO FIRST, you want your villager on a green screen background. to do this, go to harv's island and use a custom pattern to make the walls and floors bright green. If the villager you're using has green in their design, you'll have to pick a different colour that isn't in their design, but for most villagers green is fine.

if your villager has every colour on them like pietro or stiches then rip you're gonna have to do some manual editing frame by frame. try to choose a colour that doesn't touch the edges of their silhouette too much in that case because it'll make life easier for you

so once you have them in green purgatory, record them doing their emote or whatever. I just use the built-in screen record function that the switch has. press and hold this button to record the last 30 seconds that your switch displayed:

next send that video to your computer and trim off the start of the video so it starts right before a recognizable part of the animation. for this emote I cut it off right before the blink. if you have a slow computer, you'll probably want to trim the end off too so the video is only a little bit longer than one full animation loop

(you can use the video editing software of your preference, I just use quick time player Edit -> Trim)

okay time for photoshop. go File -> Import -> Video Frames to Layers

for "range to import" select "from beginning to end" (or you could skip the last step about trimming the video and select a range here, but I find it kind of finicky), and make sure "make frame animation" is checked

once imported, if it doesn't pop up on it's own, go Window -> Timeline to get your animation at the bottom

click through those frames at the bottom until you find an easily recognizable frame (I chose the first frame where her eyes are closed) and delete all the frames before it. in the layers panel, the layer from the frame you've selected should be the only one turned on. delete all the layers below it

now go through the frames to find the next identical frame. this is where the animation loops. delete that frame and all the frames after it, as well as all of their corresponding layers (note in the picture, frame 121 is selected, and it's exactly the same as the frame from the start of the animation)

hit the play button on the bottom left to double check that it loops properly

next, make sure both THE FIRST FRAME AND BOTTOM LAYER are selected, and crop and reduce the image to your desired size. you can do this step later if you want, it's just that doing it now will reduce the load on your computer and make it run a bit faster. just as long as the first frame and bottom layer are selected, you can do this at any time

SAVE HERE because if you mess up this next part it's a pain to fix, but it's easy to quit and start over if need be

now it's time for my best friend the actions panel !! say hi actions panel !! (Window -> Actions). what the actions panel does is record your steps so you can quickly automate repetitive tasks.

in the actions panel, click the folder and name it whatever you want

then click the little plus and name that whatever you want and hit record. You'll see the dot turn red to indicate that your actions are now being recorded

now with the BOTTOM LAYER AND FIRST FRAME selected (ignore that I have the wrong layer selected in the pictures, I fixed it after), go to Select -> Colour Range

click on a part of the canvas that would be green

shift+click on the rest of the green background and adjust the fuzziness until just the character's silhouette remains

hit OK, now the background should be selected. go Select -> Inverse so that the character is selected, and click on layer mask.

click the next frame button (you MUST click the button, not the actual frame. you need the recording to recognize "go to next frame" and not "select frame 2"),

then keyboard shortcut option + ] to select the next layer up (again, you MUST use the shortcut so it knows to move up one layer and not just "select layer 2"),

and then stop recording.

now just repeatedly click the play button and it will do all those steps we just did for each frame :)

this part is usually where it gets messed up for me. if it did something weird like duplicate the same frame or layer your animation over a static frame, just quit and reopen that save I told you to make earlier. the action recording you just made will still be there when you reopen photoshop, so just select the first frame and bottom layer and repeatedly hit play again. if it STILL doesn't work, you probably did something wrong

the recording is now saved in photoshop forever until you delete it, so you can reuse the recording for other gifs! but if they use a different colour background, you'll need to make a new recording (you can see I have separate ones for blue and purple screens). also if you were working with one of those colourful villagers and parts got masked out that shouldn't have been, you'll have to go frame by frame and manually fix them. that's why we masked out the background instead of deleting it.

now it's time to make it into a gif! go File -> Export -> Save for Web. make sure Matte is set to "none" so you don't get those weird white flecks. colours and dither you want as high as they can go, but you can lower them if you need to make the file smaller (though I'd recommend resizing the image smaller first). the bottom left shows your file size. currently as of January 2024, tumblr allows gifs of up to 10MB

and there ya go! gif! :)

[ezdotjpg]

do you happen to have any tips on coloring comics? i often find myself getting frustrated and overwhelmed by everything i have to do, and it almost amazes me how other artists seem to handle it fairly well lol. divulge your secrets?

hello! i have a post about how I color here!

it can get really overwhelming, there's a LOT to consider when coloring a comic page. top things that make it easier for me are

filling in all the important characters and details with one flat shade (usually grey tones for me) so that I can clip my colors to it without worrying about staying in the lines. I do this as I go, as soon as the linework in a panel is finished it gets filled.

making color palettes for every character! I use clip studio paint, which has a color set function. every character, and sometimes important props or settings, gets their own set. when I do colors for an update I go color set by color set, meaning that if I'm starting with Loft, I'll color every instance of him across the update before I move on to the next character. Once every character has flats, I'll color the backgrounds and any new props that don't have a palette yet.

i say this all the time but. lasso fill. lasso fill. lasso fill

creating auto-actions for my shade and light layers! again a CSP thing but photoshop and Im sure other programs have it too. It doesn't do any of the actual drawing for me, it just creates all the layers at the click of a button. it cuts down on how many repetitive actions you have to do just to set up your file

number one thing is breaking the work up into manageable chunks. I think of everything as one phase in a pipeline that gets me towards the finish line, rather than a huge amount of work that needs to be done all at once. however, if I get really stuck on one phase, rather than wasting a bunch of time I try to remind myself to move onto something easier for a moment even if its out of order. So like, if I'm really struggling to get the linework done on one panel, I'll take a break for a bit and put colors down on a different panel. By the time I go back I've usually worked out what I was stuck on.

[userpeggycarter]

i was requested by anon to make a tutorial for this gifset and here it is!

DIFFICULTY intermediate/difficult. basic giffing knowledge is definitely required.

while my gifset has a fair amount of animation, the only handmade animations can be found in the second and fifth gif. the rest are assets (the checkmarks, the sharpie circles) (either gifs or videos) i found on the internet and pasted over my gif.

THE BASICS OF TIMELINE GIFFING

if you gif with frames, you will need to use a timeline for the animation to work (keyframes). i’m a timeline giffer anyway so this was another Tuesday for me. if you never used that method of giffing, however, it can be confusing, especially if you never used a video editing software before (the timeline works like video editing). 

so, here’s a breakdown of what is the timeline:

the player icons work like any video/music player in existence. ignore the volume icon.

the gear icon indicates the quality of the reproduction while editing it, not the quality of the end product. think like it’s Youtube reproduction settings on a video in order to save your 4G data, but with RAM power instead. this is very useful if your computer isn’t very powerful to begin with and gifs with VFX are very heavy to handle. 

i always click the loop option inside the gear panel because i like to see how the gif will be viewed by the public, i find watching to play only once isn’t very productive. you can stop and restart the reproduction by pressing the space bar on your keyboard.

every layer of your PSD file will have its own bar. the length of the bar means the duration of the gif, so a longer bar means a longer gif and a shorter one, a shorter gif. for everything that isn’t your gif/screencap-based (ie, coloring, typography, lightning, shapes, etc) can be dragged by the extremities as much as you want, making the asset last as long as you want. the only layer that is limited by its maximum duration is naturally your gif, but you can also drag it to make it shorter.

you can also drag a whole layer bar by clicking it and dragging it, making the start and finishing point different from the rest. be careful while doing that otherwise you will end up with blank frames, messing up the looping of your gif completely.

there’s a needle you can drag across the timeline and it works just like on a vinyl disc, the moment the needle drops, it’s the moment/frame Photoshop will show you.

you can also trim your stuff by cutting and deleting snippets of the bar. for that, you will drag your needle to the desired moment, use the scissor tool and then press delete to erase the unwanted bit.

it’s important to point out that the timeline only allows 0.03x or 0.07px speed, no matter what the speed the gif was before converting to that method. if the original speed is closer to 0.03x, then PS will define the new speed as 0.03x. if it’s closer to 0.07x, then it’s 0.07x. i always change the speed to 0.03x before converting to timeline for the sake of not screwing stuff up, which means i see my gif looping while editing in a faster way than Tumblr users will see when the gifset is posted. this takes a while to adjust to if you’re new to timeline giffing, but eventually you don’t think it’s jarring anymore.

that also means you will need to correct the speed after your gif is completely finished. to do that, i use this action.

you can zoom in and zoom out using the little mountain sliding bar. this will be useful later in the tutorial.

if you zoom to the max, you will see all the numbers above your layer bar. these are time marks. the thing is, they seem a bit weird at first. the bigger numbers indicate SECONDS (01:00f, 02:00f, 03:00f, etc), while the smaller and repetitive numbers indicate frames (5f, 10f, 15f, 25f). that means that the smallest drag of your needle possible (from point A to point B) refers to an interval of 1 frame. you will need to take this into consideration while animating stuff.

you can color code your layers, if you think that makes it easier for you to see what you are doing. this is something i do, not only in Photoshop but every Adobe product with a timeline. to change the color of a layer bar (the default is purple), you can right-click on your layer in the layer panel and click the color you want. the colors are the very last thing in the list when you right-click it.

another organization tip is the use of folders. if you create a folder in the layers panel, a folder is created inside the timeline and any layer inside of that folder will disappear from the panel until you click the little arrow next to the name of the folder in the timeline panel. you can color code your folder as well, making every layer inside of it the same color or even different colors.

THE BASICS OF KEYFRAMES

every change related to any property selected (transformation, opacity, style, text warp, position of the layer mask, activation of the layer mask) will be computed in the exact moment in the gif you change it. if that doesn’t happen, you can force Photoshop to do it by clicking the small diamond next to the property name.

let’s say you want an animation to start 0.5 seconds after the gif starts, so you will drag your “needle” to 0.5 seconds and then make the change (making a text bigger, moving a shape, etc). 

Photoshop will automatically bridge the gap between the state of the gif at 0 seconds and 0.5 seconds, thus animating your gif. 

to start animating, you will need to click the little clock next to the property you want to animate. make sure you click the clock while your needle is at the exact beginning of the gif.

every change (keyframe) will be marked with a small diamond under the layer bar, at the exact moment you changed it. that means if you make jarring changes in a short amount of time/frames, the animation will be quick and abrupt. if the interval is very long, the animation will be slow and smooth.

the selected(s) keyframe(s) will have their diamond painted yellow, while the unselected ones will be grayed out. 

you can right-click the diamonds to delete or copy them. if you have many diamonds and want to delete them all, you can click and drag to form a square and select all of them just like when you do to select many files at once on a PC folder. there’s also the option “select all” under the right-click panel.

you can also drag them and change their timing that way. if you have more than one diamond selected, if you drag them, their interval will remain the same, but the starting and finishing point of those two diamonds will change.

THE SQUARES BAR

the easiest of the two animations. this one doesn’t require keyframe animation, but i put this in the last bit of the tutorial for the sake of its flow.

first, i added the empty squares. they last as long as the gif lasts. after 6 frames, i added the first colored square and made that square last until the end of the gif. i repeated this in a staggered manner (+2 frames delay each colored square) so the colored squares appear at equal intervals. 

THE STATS BAR

the most difficult of the two, but don’t worry, you got this. 

first, you will need to structure your stats, ie, add the text, the dividing line and the pointed lines. that is, if you want to follow the exact design i used in my gif, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

next, you will create rectangles that fill the entire stat bars. you will add a layer mask to each one of them and with a layer mask selected, select a rectangle about the size of your original rectangle, then paint it black. you will notice the original rectangle will disappear. if you delete the layer mask, the original rectangle will appear again. that is because you didn’t delete the original rectangle, you just hid it by using a layer mask.

there’s a chain icon between the layer and the layer mask in the layers panel, click it to unlink them.

click the clock next to “layer mask position” with your needle at 0 seconds/frames. drag your needle to the moment you want the stats to end and use the arrow keys to move the layer mask. you will notice the original rectangle will slowly be revealed by you moving the layer mask. you will also notice that a small diamond will appear in the “layer mask position” line in the timeline. you created a keyframe!

if you press play, you will see the animation from the bar going from null to full!

FURTHER READING/VIEWING

this tutorial uses layer mask animation to reveal text too!

a video tutorial for better visualization!

another keyframe tutorial, this time focusing on coloring!

if you still have any questions, feel free to contact me!

and if you (or anyone) else want, i can go in depth in animating each property, i just did a quick overview + explained the stats animation.

[antoniosvivaldi]

Oh I’m sorry I have GOT to ask! How did you do the text animation in the first gif of 718688291365502976/pscentral-event-15-favourite-ships-kanej?? It’s just. It’s so beautiful

Hi anon! I've used After Effects to create the text animation in the first panel of this post. I'll show you the basic idea of how I've created the animated text effect here :D

What you need:

A cutout font (the font that I've used is Trouble Child Outblack by @justlikethistrain)

Adobe Photoshop with Video Timeline feature

Adobe After Effects

Supplementary files: gif prep action pack / golden outline layer style / assorted textures

Difficulty: advanced; knowledge in gifmaking with the video timeline interface assumed

Note: This tutorial assumes that you're working with all of the composite gifs in a Photoshop composition file and using the video timeline interface

Other useful tutorials to refer to: Text overlay effect / After Effects text animation / clipping mask vs layer mask

Tutorial under the cut. Like / reblog if you find this useful!

1) Photoshop: Preparing your gif panel

Setting up your PSD composition panel: Create a blank PSD file and set it to Tumblr dimensions (540px x 540px in this particular gifset)

Enable Video Timeline and drag all of the component gifs from your folder to the PSD composition file. Resize / move these gifs around until you're happy with the placements.

Trim the timeline work area so it's the same length as the shortest component gif you've added to the PSD composition file. You can also add some textures & additional adjustment onto this panel.

2) Photoshop: Exporting your base gif

I highly recommend exporting the base gif right now, to ensure a smoother experience scrubbing through the video timeline when adding finishing touches later on in the workflow.

My preferred method is to render the composition as a video clip from File > Export > Render video.

To get the optimal export quality, I use the following settings:

3) Photoshop: Preparing your text layer

Make a new Photoshop composition file of Tumblr dimensions

Drag in the video clip that you've just rendered (the base gif) to this composition file

Add a new text layer in your PSD composition file and set the colour to white then tweak this layer until you're happy with the text placement.

For performance optimisations on After Effects, I duplicate the PSD composition file and delete all other layers. This PSD file contains only the text layer that will be animated.

4) Photoshop: Adding overlays & decorations on the text layer

This step allows you to preview the text effect without the animations (i.e. allows you to tweak the texturings & colourings)

Duplicate the text layer. Set the bottom layer's (highlighted in red) blend mode to Exclusion and apply the gold outline layer style to the top layer (highlighted in green). Make sure the Inner Shadow is disabled!

The panel now looks like this

I want to have the liberty to use different colours & textures on the bottom text layer with animation, so the next thing I do is to right click on the bottom text layer and select "Group from Layers"

To change the colour of the filled text layer to purple:

Collapse the Group that you've just created

On top of the collapsed Group a purple Colour Fill layer,

Set the Fill layer's blend mode to "Colour"

Right click on the Fill layer and select "Create Clipping Mask"

Now the colour of the filled text layer is purple

After adding more textures & decorations on the text layer (with photo negative effects) I get the following:

5) Photoshop: Adding overlays & decorations on the text layer

To avoid performance issues on After Effects, I make a new PSD file of the same dimension. With both the PSD files open, I select the text layer (highlighted in red) while holding Shift, I drag this to the blank PSD file (see the green arrow)

Holding Shift ensures that the layer's placement is preserved when it's copied to a separate PSD file.

In the new PSD file, I set the text layer's blend mode to "Normal"

6) After Effects: Animating your text layer

Make a new project on After Effects and drag in the text layer PSD file. Import this file as a Composition

Also drag in the base gif video clip to the AE project.

While we won't be exporting anything with the base gif visible, having this file in the project file is useful if you want to have a better picture of how the animation will look in tandem with the gif.

Double click on the composition. Hide the colour fill and background layers. Then right click on the text layer, go to Create > Convert to Editable Text

To be able to preview the animation with the base gif, drag the video clip to the composition file and below the text layer. The visibility of the layer can be toggled on / off anytime in the After Effects workflow

Now we prepare the text layer to be animated. Because the final animated effects is 3D & has motion blur, right click on the text layer and select "3D layer" (highlighted in green) and Switches > Motion Blur (highlighted in red)

Go to Animation Presets > Text to browse through some presets that you could use to animate the text layer. For this gifset, I've used a preset within the 3D Text folder called "3D Random Spike Tumble in".

While selecting your text layer, press U to view the keyframes and you can adjust the position of these keyframes until you're happy.

For more finishing touches, press U again to tweak more options in this preset. In this case, I do to Animato 1 > Range Selector and changed the Colour Fill to #fff (the default colour is light yellow)

Then do you File > Export > Add to Render Queue

Click on the Output Module and use the following settings to render the text layer as a video file with transparency

Then after specifying the folder in which you'll export the video to, click "Render" to render the video file containing your animated text layer.

7) Photoshop: Adding the animated text & finishing touches

On Photoshop, drag the rendered clip containing animated text, to the PSD composition file with the static text layers.

Duplicate the animated text video layer

Drag one of the layers inside Group 1 and set the blend mode to "Exclusion" (Highlighted in green)

Move the other layer to the top and apply the gold outline layer style with Inner Shadow disabled (highlighted in red)

Hide both text layers (highlighted in yellow)

By scrubbing through the timeline, I've noticed that the animation didn't look clean enough, so I'll add some finishing touches

By selecting the upper text layer containing layer styles, go to the timeline and add opacity keyframes going from opacity 0% to 100% a few frames apart

Once you're happy with the finishing touches, flatten / render your PSD composition file, change the frame delay to 0.05s and export your gif and voila!

I hope this helps 💖

[tommykinard]

Hello hello, in your gifset with the boops, how did you get the boop animation?

hi anon! i'd be happy to explain how i did the boop animation in this gifset!

you want to first create your base gif (and do all your sharpening and colouring steps), and we'll be doing the animation in timeline mode. here's what i'm starting with — all my gifs for this set were around 35-40 frames each:

rest of the tutorial under the cut:

i then downloaded the boop pngs from this post, and resized them and placed them over my gif in the desired position, like so:

next you convert your boop png layer into a smart object (right click on your layer and click "convert to smart object), and now we're ready to start animating!

Animating the boop:

place the red marker with the blue arrowhead somewhere in the middle of your gif in the timeline mode, and make sure you have a lot of space outside your canvas to work. i placed it at 1:00.

2. click on the little drop down arrow of your boop layer in the timeline, and click on the little clock symbol next to where it says "transform". after that, you should see a little yellow diamond where your red timeline marker is.

3. now i want the timing to be smooth and even, just like how the animation appears on tumblr, so i've marked out evenly spaced markers for where the animation begins (5f) and ends (25f). the closer you are to your midpoint (the red marker/yellow diamond), the faster your animation will be, and the further out you are from your midpoint, the slower your animation will be.

4. now i move my red timeline marker to the 5f position, and then making sure my boop layer is selected in my layers panel, i hit command + t (or ctrl + t).

5. now first i go up to the top bar in photoshop, and make sure that little link button (red) is selected. then i go to where i see the width percentage (cyan) and increase the size a little bit (i did around 120%). this is so that there'll be a tiny bit of zoom in/out when the boop paw enters and exits the screen.

then you go to the boop png on your canvas and move it off of your canvas in the direction you want it to appear from. mine looks like this, and then hit enter to save that position.

you should see a grey diamond appear on your timeline under the red marker. this is what our gif should look like at this point:

6. now for the exit animation, we repeat step 4 and 5 exactly, but this time with the red timeline marker at the 25f position.

Saving the gif:

7. so now we convert our gif back to the frame-by-frame animation mode (using the save action from this pack, or however you usually do it).

8. click through each frame of your gif and delete duplicate frames (look at the movement in your gif to help you, not the movement of the boop). make sure your frame delay is set to 0.05 and then export like you usually would.

and there you have it! hope this helped!