#evilvvithin's 8k

[evilvvithin]

Hello folks! As someone who never did any celebrations nor tutorials for giffing, I decided it's finally the time now. So thank y'all for putting up with my horror shenanigans, 8k is just amazing and I hope y'all will keep enjoying my blog and posts!

PHOTOPEA GIF TUTORIAL

Moving to Photoshop after years of using Photopea, I can say while they both work very similarly, they're also different. Photoshop is far superior, you can still make very HQ and nice gifs in Photopea too! This post aims to show you my personal way of making crispy gifs while also covering the basics of getting the frames and uploading them to Photopea. (If you're looking for more detailed beginner tutorial, there's plenty of those out there, amazingly done!)

Photopea is completely free, video player is completely free, downloading movies is completely free. Only thing it'll cost you is your time.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED:

- photopea - potplayer - good quality movie file ( i go for the highest GB ones, above 10gb is amazing. Sometimes I get 40gb and prefer 1080p source. Note that higher file doesn't immediately mean higher quality - if the movie looks weird just download another one)

GETTING THE FRAMES: Once you get your source file and open it via PotPlayer, find the scene you want to gif. Using D and F keys you can go backwards or forward by single frames. When you get the perfect frame where you want the gif to start, I always go back 10 frames because PotPlayer tends to cut those out. It's better to get more frames than you need as you can always delete those extra ones later on.

I'll be giffing scene from Longlegs alongside the tutorial.

PRESS CTRL + G. This will open the frame capturing window. Fix the setting to match these:

and press "START". Click back on the PotPlayer to bring focus back on the window and hold or press the forward key - F - to play the scene and capture the frames. You can see the frames number going up on your other window. If it stays on 0 you're not capturing anything. Once the desired scene is over, press "STOP" on the frame capturing window and voila - you have your frames in your selected folder. Delete any extra or unwanted ones. The amount of frames usually sits between 40-80 depending on what ratio you'll use later on for the gifs to fit the 10mb Tumblr upload limit.

Now it's time to open PHOTOPEA.

FILE > NEW: you have to write down the exact dimensions of your frames. This action will create a new file with single background. Go back to FILE > OPEN AND PLACE > SELECT ALL YOUR FRAMES and upload them. Depending on the size of the frames, this could take a while or even lag your browser. Make sure to not click anywhere within the app before all frames are done uploading.

Now lets finally make the gif. The following were my most used gif making steps in general, play around other options and find out what works - every gif or scene is different!

Delete the original empty layer at the bottom and then select all the frames (clicking the first/last layer and then click the last/first layer while holding shift to easily select all) and by pressing CTRL+G, group them. Select all layer again and

RIGHT CLICK (on the layers) > RASTERIZE LAYER (on the upper taskbar) > ANIMATION > MAKE FRAMES Now your frames should have _a_ in their names. CREATE NEW LAYER

and select all your frames again.

CROP the whole project to whatever ratio you want, Ill be using 64x44 ratio for wider gif.

By pressing ALT+CTRL+I open the RESIZE window. Tumblr gif dimension is 540px wide max (heres tutorial for other dimensions and why correct sizing is important) so using that and "bicupic sharper" option under resample, resize the gif.

Now you have the base gif done.

Its dark, muddy and unclear. We sharpen it and give it the clear crispy look using noise. FILTER > NOISE > ADD NOISE and set the Amount to 1% and select monochromatic FILTER> SHARPEN > SMART SHARPEN > 150% amount with 1px radius FILTER> SHARPEN > SMART SHARPEN > 50% x 10px

Now its time to bring the gif to life. Create NEW ADJUSTMENT LAYER. This is where all the editing options are.

For this specific gif Im doing:

BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST +50 brightness, +10 contrast

VIBRANCE +20 vibrance, +10 saturation

HUE/SATURATION master -50 , red +50, cyan +50, blue +50 (the reason i tune all colors in master down by 50 is to mute them all down. Adding back on colors you want is making them stand out way more! It works on gifs with dominant few colors but if the gif is very colorful, you're better off leaving this option out completely and rather work with selective colors. As I said, try it out and see!)

another layer of BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST +20 brightness

COLOR BALANCE range: midtones > magenta - green: -11, yellow - blue: +8

SELECTIVE COLOR red: cyan: -20%, yellow: +20, black: +10 yellow: yellow: +50% white: yellow: -10%, black: -20% black: black: +4%

CURVES(those are something I didnt use much in Photopea as in general youre just fine with brightness and selective color. Just move the point on the curve and see what it does! For this gif I went with Curves like these and it enhanced the gif nicely.)

another layer of SELECTIVE COLOR > black: black: +2%

Now Im satisfied with the gif and want to save it. Clicking FILE > EXPORT AS > GIF will open this window:

Make sure the quality is at 100%, the size in darker numbers lower than 10MB. Speed in Photopea is quite tricky for some reason, but 180% - 190% is the "normal 100% speed" of the gif.

Enjoy giffing and feel free to ask anything if unclear!