#gif tutorial by an adhd person trigger warning

[gamorahww]

hi! i was wondering if you have any advice/certain programs or anything you use for making gifs, because there’s something i really want to make but i have zero experience 💔💔

hello hello!

ah, yes, I have a TON, let's hope this ADHD girlie can give a somewhat concise description lmao. I will answer this publicly, in case it's useful for anyone else.

Software I use:

To make the screenshots: - for single scenes: KMPlayer 12.22.30 (the newer versions are trash) - for shorter videos, or something you want to get all the screenshots out of Free Video to JPG converter is awesome.

To make the gifs: - Adobe Photoshop 2021 (I don't recommend much later versions, because of the Cloud connection they have)

General gif-maker wisdom: "we spend more time on making sure that something looks serviceable, not pixelated, and good quality, than to get it moving and shit" - Confucius, probably

Useful stuff to make your life easy:

- Squishmoon's action pack for sharpening your screenshots. You can also find their detailed use explained here. - If you are planning to gif Wicked, some scenes are a bit tricky, ngl. But I have two PSDs that you can use, while you're perecting your own craft, and you can edit and update them to make them more "you".

A neutral PSD for mostly indoors and lighter scenes | download

A blue-enhancing PSD for darker scenes | download

Some info on videos to use: - always, always (ALWAYS) use at least HD videos. Otherwise your gif will look like shit. This should be ideally at least 720p in resolution, but go with 1080p for the best results. Coloring gifs in 1080p is easy, but... - if you want to go pro *rolls eyes*, you could go for HDR (2160p) quality. However HDR is a mf to color properly and I would not recommend it for a beginner. When you extract frames from an HDR video, the image colors will end up being washed out and muddy so you will always have to balance those colors out for it to look decent, however, the quality and number of pixels will be larger. If you ar okay with making small/medium sized images, then stick with 1080p. (Storytime, I spent a lot of time making HDR screenshots, only for me to realize that I really hate working with them, so I'm actually considering going back to 1080p, despite that not being "industry standard" on Tumblr lmao. I'm not sure yet But they take up so much space, and if you have a laptop that is on the slower side, you will suffer.)

See the below example of the image differences, without any effects. You will probably notice, that HDR has some more juicy detail and is a LOT sharper, but well... the color is just a lot different and that's something you will have to calculate in and correct for.

The ✨Process✨

Screencaptures

I like to have all screenshots/frames ready for use. So as step one, you need to get the movie file from somewhere. This should definitely be a legal source, and nothing else (jk).

Once I have the movie. I spend a lot of time making and sorting screencaps. Since I mostly work in the Wicked fandom only atm, that means I will only need to make the frames once, and thats awesome, cause this is the most boring part.

For this, I let the Video to JPG Converter run the whole movie while I was aleep, and by morning, it created gorgeous screenshots for me and my laptop almost went up in flames.

You need to make sure you capture every single frame, so my settings looked like this:

Screenshots do take up a lot of space, so unless your computer has a huge brain, I suggest storing the images in an external drive. For Wicked, the entire movie was I think around 200k frames total. I reduced that to about 120k that I will actually use.

And then I spend some time looking through them, deleting the scenes I know I won't do ever (goodbye Boq, I will never gif you, I'm so sorry :((( ) and also, I like to put them into folders by scene. My Wicked folder looks like this:

If you don't want this struggle and you only need a few specific scenes, there is this great tutorial on how to make frames from KMPlayer. Note that some of the info in this tutorial on gif quality requirements and Tumblr's max allowance of size and # of frames are outdated. You are allowed to post a gif that is a maximum of 10 Mb and 120 frames (maybe it can be even more, idk, said the expert) on Tumblr. But the process of screencapturing is accurate. Also ignore the gifmaking process in this tutorial, we have a lot easier process now as well!

Prepping the images

I have a folder called "captures", where I put all of the specific screenshots for a set I want to use. Inside this folder I paste all the shots/scenes I want to work on for my current gifset, and then I create subfolders. I name them 1, 2, 3, etc, I make one folder for each gif file I want to make. Its important that only the frames you want to be in the gif are in the folder. I usually limit the number of images to 100, I don't really like to go above it, and usually aim to go lower, 50-70 frames, but sometimes you just need the 100.

Sidetrack, but: Keep in mind that Tumblr gifs also need to be a specific width, so that they don't get resized, and blurry. (Source) Height is not that important, but witdth is VERY. But since there is a limit on Mb as well, for full width (540px) gifs you will want to go with less frames, than for smaller ones.

Once you have the frames in folders, you will open Photoshop, and go to: File > Scripts > Load files into stack.

Here you select Folder from the dropdown menu, and then navigate to the folder where you put the frames for your first gif. It will take a moment to load the frames into the window you have open, but it will look like this:

You click "OK" and then it will take anther few moments for Photoshop to load all the frames into a file.

But once that's done, and you have the frames, you next have to resize the image. Go to Image > Image size... When you resize in Photoshop, and save as gif, sometimes you do end up with a light transparent border on the edge that looks bad, so, when you resize, you have to calculate in that you will be cutting off a few pixels at the end. In this example, I want to make a 268px width gif. I usually look at heights first, so lets say I want it to be a close-up, and I will cut off the sides, and it will be more square-ish. So I set height to 240px. Always double check that your width doesn1t run over your desired px numbers, but since 575 is larger than 268 (can you tell I'm awesome at math?), I should be good. I click OK.

Next, you have to crop the image. Go to Image > Canvas size... At this point we can get rid of those extra pixels we wanted to drop from the bottom as well, so we will make it drop from the height and the width as well. I set the width to 268px, and the height to 235px, because I have OCD, and numbers need to end with 0 or 5, okay?

And now, the magic happens! First, go to Window > Actions to have the actions window show up. While you're at it, in the Window menu also select Timeline (this will be your animation timeline at the button) and also Layers. Once you have the Actions window showing up, on the menu in the upper right corner click the three lines menu button, and from the list select "Load Actions". I hope you downloaded the Squishmoon action pack from the start of this post, if not, do it now! So you save that file, and then after you clicked Load, you... well, load it. It will show up in your list like so:

You will want to use the sharpening - HD one, BUT I personally like to go, and remove the tick from the spot I circled above, so leave that empty. This will result in the image having more contrast, which is very much needed for these darker scenes.

When you have that, you select the action itself like so, and click the play button at the bottom. The action will do everything for you, sharpen, increase contrast and also, create the gif and set the frame speed. You won't need to edit anything, just whatever window pops up, click "OK"

Now it should all look like something like this:

In the Layers window on the side, scroll all the way up to the top. The frame on the top is your last frame. Every effect you want to add to the gif should go to here, otherwise it won't apply to all frames. So at this point I open my PSD for darker scenes, and pull the window of it down, above the gif I'm working on like so:

And then I grab the folder I marked with yellow, left click, hold the click down, and drag that folder over to my current gif. And bamm, it will have the nice effect I wanted! You can click the little play button at the button to see a preview.

Once you have it sorted, now its time to extract it, but first, here's our before and after view:

Now, if you are happy with this, you can just save and close.

If you want to add subtitles, you can do that as well either manually with the text tool (remember, to add as the TOP layer as we did with the coloring) or you can use a pre-set PSD for that as well, here's mine.

Now, we just need to export it. Go to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy) and copy my settings here. Others may use other settings, but these are mine, so! I hope you are happy with them :3

In this case, for colors, I picked 128 colors, because on dark sscenes you can get away with using less colors, and the larger that number is, the bigger the filesize. If you use lighter images, you will need to bump that shit up to 256, but that will make your file larger. You can see at the bottom of the screen, how large your file will end up being. So long as you are under 9 Mb, you should be good :3

Conclusion

Look, Gif making and Photoshop in general is a bit scary at first. There are a lot of settings you can mess around on your own, a lot to play with, and also a lot can go wrong. This is a very basic tutorial, and also my current process and preferred coloring. However if you look at "gif psd" or "gif tutorial" or similar tags on Tumblr, you can find a LOT of great resources and steps, for many-many things. Usually people are not too antsy about sharing their methods either. You make 4-5 gifs, and you will have the steps locked down, and then it's all about experimenting.

After you have some muscle memory, your next step should be to explore what is inside a PSD coloring folder that you use. Open them up, try clicking around, click the little eye, to see what happens if they are turned off, and double click them, and play around with the sliders, to see what each does. Most people on Tumblr don't really know what each one does, we all just pressed a few buttons and got really lucky with the results, lol.

If anything is unclear, don't hesitate to ask, I'll gladly help!

Good luck <3