#have a set of screenshots while i redo my gifsets now that i know how to edit them better

[casino-lights]

it's hardly a fair fight when one of us has a horde of venatori behind him.

it's hardly a fair fight when neither of us wants the other dead.

[sleepymarmot]

I haven’t giffed for a while, so making the previous post was a bit of an adventure.

I started this gifset in February 2021. Back then I ripped every frame and the gifs were too big for tumblr, so I had to delete every other frame by hand. It looked so choppy that I put the post on ice, and it got buried under other drafts. Evidently I found the post again months later but didn’t fix it and left it to rot again.

I found the post again this week and almost published in that state, but thought it’d be too embarrassing to post a gifset with every second frame in 2023. I then tried to remake it in proper quality. I discovered that I had one of the gifs ripped with every second frame, and had to re-rip it again (and remember how to crop them). For some reason, the new screenshots were brighter, so I had to use a different coloring for them. I also had to split that gif into two, but that’s easy.

The gifs were still way past the Tumblr limit, and I was on the brink of losing hope and shelving the post again when I realized that I can just reduce the number of colors. This is b/w! There are 64 and even 32 colors per gif in that post and it all looks perfectly fine. So my big problem from two years ago was finally solved. (Too bad this solution would not work with normal color gifs.)

The original version was also awfully slow. For the new one I started experimenting with frame delays since I’m unfamiliar with giffing every frame. At first I tried to abandon frame animation altogether and set the FPS on the timeline the same as original video, but that didn’t work (in two different ways). Then I realized that gif exporting ruins frame delays anyway, rounding them up/down to either 0.03 or 0.07. 0.03 looked perfect in my desktop image viewer but too fast on Tumblr in the browser. 0.05 looked too slow. Then it finally occurred to me to do the math, and 1 second / 23.976 fps indeed equals 0.04 (rounded). So I adjusted the gifs to have 0.04 as frame delay and it still looks wrong somehow, even though objectively it should be the best option.

By the way, I had to carefully replace gifs one by one in the original post buried like fifty pages deep within my drafts, and not just because I didn’t want to make a new one: that draft is in the legacy photo post format, and I don’t have access to it for new posts anymore.

After finishing and uploading all that, I realized that I never cropped out the black border, and it’s quite visible at the edges of the gifs. But I already wasted way too much time to go through every gif again.

In the end, the only thing I had to redo from scratch was the final gif (now split in two). For all the others, I used the same psd, adjusted the export settings, then redid the frame delay of the exported gifs. The real time-consuming part was not the editing process itself, but figuring out what I needed to do.

All this was for an extremely simple gifset, by the way. The kind that requires no actual creativity or hard work, only a bit of technical know-how. If you know what you’re doing, and not blindly poking at the settings you’re not used to, it should take no time to make. I just want to share how much I’m overthinking everything. (And also to journal for my own sake, because this has been An Experience.)

[ultears]

Could you tell how you make those wonderful gif edits, and what effects and apps you usually use? I just love them!!! If possible can u make a tutorial please? Thanks in advance ❤❤

First of all, thank you so much!! That means a lot because I put lots of effort into making them. :) Second of all, you didn’t actually precise what gifset you’ve seen and therefore what effects you want me to explain, but I’m going to guess it’s this one because it has like, 500 different things going on :’) (if not, feel free to send me another ask specifying which gifset, although basically, any effect I’ve ever used is in this one, so it’ll be explained) 

I only use Photoshop CS6 for all of my gifsets (I don’t use anything to make the caps/frames because I feel like it’s easier to just make them in CS6) and I use a Macbook Pro if that does anything? Idk, just for the screenshots I guess haha

For these tutorials, I’m going to assume you have basic GIF-making knowledge but if you need a tutorial for that too, just send me an ask and I’ll teach you how I do it (because everyone does it slightly differently)

Disclaimer: I’m in no way an expert, most of the things I know about GIFs are thanks to the tutorials of people before me and lots of trial and error. Also, I suck at explaining things. 

I’m gonna put this under a cut or else it’s gonna take so much space oml

GRADIENTED GIFS

So these gifs are probably the easiest to make out of all of the ones in this set. I’ll be using the hand for the example because it was slightly harder to get there (you’ll see why shortly)

So you start by making your basic gif: (I edit all my gifs at 540px but these are saved at 268px for Tumblr dimensions)

Because this is a colour-matching gifset and not a vibrancy, I skip my step of basic colouring (which usually includes lots of curves, vibrancy, and selective colour, and you can see that the most in my lyrical fairy tail gifsets) Instead, I’m going straight for the gradient layers. I start off with a full black and white to get the colour contrasts, and then I put the gradient of the colours I want:

Now for this gifset, I had a basic self-made psd (if you will) that I copied on every gif to get the same colour, so I’ll do that now (it’s made up of curves, vibrancy, brightness/contrast and exposure layers)

Now, I didn’t think there was enough of a contrast between Yuuri’s hand and the background, so I added a curves, brightness/contrast and levels layer BEFORE the gradient ones so that it would affect the entire colour schemes to get this:

And there you go, that’s the gif! The one with the skates didn’t use that last step because I liked the contrast between the skates and the background already without additional layers, so that’s why it was easier. I also added snow on it like I did with all other gifs in the set, so I’ll do a separate tutorial in here for that.

TYPOGRAPHY

To be honest, I wouldn’t really be able to explain these very well considering it was my first time using them, so here are the links to the tutorials I followed. It was lots of trial and error until I got the method down, but I was happy with the end result, so I’d recommend them.

Typing the name: [x] (I actually did this one without a tutorial but this one resembles what I did, I was just too lazy to put the cursor bar lol) 

Writing “love”: [x]

So, if you followed the tutorial the same way I did, you’re going to get something like this:

Similarly to the hand, I copied the gradient I wanted (I didn’t need to put the black and white one since those are already the base colours): 

However, because I wanted the opposite colours, I clicked the little “reverse” button in the properties > gradient map to get this:

From there, I added the same PSD as earlier to reach the colour scheme:

And there you go, that’s it for the text ones! Just missing the snow. I know this makes it look simple but that’s because I didn’t make the tutorial myself for the hardest part, lol. (The handwriting one took me about an hour, so don’t despair if it takes lots of time because it’s definitely a hard effect to get a handle of)

AI / GLASSES

Alrighty! Well, these two are the object ones, and probably would’ve been considered the easiest ones if I didn’t have to deal with finding the exact image I was mentally picturing for the glasses, whoops. 

So the “Love” character comes from episode 5 when Yuuri presents his theme. I tried taking the frames where the sign doesn’t move. So, we start off with that basic gif:

Over these frames, I placed a ‘colour fill’ layer that matches the colour of the board on which Yuuri wrote, which actually gives us a completely opaque colour over everything. 

After that, I added a layer mask so we could see only the writing of the character through the fill layer, hiding everything else in the frame: 

This doesn’t look like a gif because I covered up everything that moves, but it is one! You’ll only see movement later when I add the snow, which is the only thing that moves in both this gif and the glasses one. Now, like the other gifs, I added the gradient (also reversed like the writing to get the proper colours) and the psd to make it darker like the others as well, and you get to this:

And there you go! That’s how I made the Ai gif. You can also do it like I’m about to do the glasses, with a singular screencap, turned into multiple frames.

So for the glasses, I searched online for an image that I thought resembled Yuuri’s glasses and found these, which I was satisfied with: [x]

To get to the shape I wanted, I messed around with the image size and the canvas size until I got them approximatively the size I wanted them in my usual 540x304 canvas size, like this:

Now that I had my image, I converted it to a frame timeline like with most of my gifs, and copied the image into multiple frames so I had this:

Now, for all intents and purposes, although nothing is moving (yet), this is a gif because it has the multiple frames going on a loop. Like with all of the other gifs I’ve made, I put the gradient layers (this one had a black and white one because there’s blue in this one as well) and the PSD:

And that’s it! Again, just missing the snow to make it look like a moving gif. I’m guessing that you can see my pattern at this point, haha! Now I’m going to screw it over with the final two gifs, that are a little different. Whoops. 

CHARACTER CUT-OUT GIFS

Welcome, friends, to the most time-consuming form of gif I have ever made. Luckily, only the cutting out of the character takes time, the rest is pretty straightforward from what I’ve done in the past gifs, and you can reuse the cut-out characters for any future gifsets as well (I used these cutouts from a previous gifset I made, this one here) 

I learned how to do these cutout gifs (well I had a general idea on how to do it but her explanations make it so much clearer) thanks to bae’s @katsuukis ‘s tutorial here, so you should probably just follow her tutorial ‘cause mine’s a mess. :’) 

You start off with your basic gif. (the fewer the frames, the less you’ll want to jump off a bridge while doing it: this example is 11 frames, but the other gif is 58 frames, and let me tell you, it was unpleasant) I try keeping it the original size of the frames (in my case, 1280x720px) so it’s easier to edit the masks to remove the backgrounds. (but I will be saving them at 268px later on) 

I chose the frames for this one so that it looks like an eternal loop, but you can do whatever you want! 

Alright, now for the masking. You’re going to select both the frame in the timeline and its equivalent layer. Using the ‘quick selection tool’, you’re going to select around Yuuri until you have the whole background, like this:

And you’re going to click ‘refine edge’ (in the top bar) so it looks like this. I use the same settings as Alice recommends in her tutorial, and it seems to do the trick. And then you click ‘OK’:

Then, you’re going to right click, choose ‘select inverse’, and you’re going to click the little rectangle with a circle in the middle of it at the bottom right under the layers (if you hover over it, it says ‘Add layer mask’) 

And it should give you something like this:

Because this is a tutorial, I did this a little sloppily, but the more detailed you get with the mask, the better, so take as much as you need to get it how you want. And, you’re going to redo this for every frame. (this is why it’s better to have 11 frames than 58, lol) Now that all the masking is done, I resize the gif to its usual 540px width. In the end, it should give you something like this: 

The edges for this gif seem a little rough but imo they look better when you have a background, which is what we’re going to do next. 

In the layers section, under all the images of Yuuri, you’re going to place a colour fill layer, like this:

This colour matches the purple end of the gradient I’ve been using. The shades are completely the same. (#9c9fb7) And from there, you’re pretty much set. You don’t need to put a gradient on this one, but you do have to put the PSD, so:

Note: the psd I’ve been using for all of these gifs was based from these gifs, meaning I adjusted all the colours to get what I wanted from the gifs containing Yuuri’s face in them. So logically, these are the first gifs I made for the set. But yeah, that’s it! Just missing the snow, once again. 

SNOW

So, on all of the gifs, you can see there’s a light snowfall going on. Probably to no one’s surprise, I also learned this trick from @katsuukis tutorial here, and really it’s pretty simple, although I changed it a little because I hate using smart filters, lmao. 

We’ll use the glasses for the example because it’s the only gif in here that started out not as some frames from the show or an animated text, but literally just an image copied into multiple frames (you’ll see why having the multiple frames was necessary now as opposed to just keeping the one frame) 

So you start off with this:

You’re going to open your chosen file for snow in Photoshop. I found that the one Alice uses is a little too thin in snow (considering I’m incorporating the snow into the gradient instead of leaving it white on top) so I found a very similar gif that just has more snowflakes (or maybe I’m crazy) (I’m not 100% sure if it’s this one because I didn’t save its origins but here:)  [x] :

So you open the gif up in Photoshop, select as many frames of it as you need (I made the glasses gif to be 24 frames, so that’s how many frames I’m taking from the snow) and copy them:

Go over to your main gif (the glasses in this case), select all the frames and click ‘paste frames…’:  

And make sure that you select ‘Paste over selection’ then click ‘OK’:

It should look something like this, which is completely normal:

In the Layers section, create a new group, and place all of the snow layers in there. (Rename the group ‘snow’ if you want) Move the newly created group between the black/white gradient and the gradient of your choice (mine is the purple/off-white one):

Finally, when selecting all of the frames in the timeline and the group that contains the snow, change its mode from ‘Pass through’ to ‘Screen’

And there you go! That’s how you add the snow (here it is in 540px so you can properly see the effect). 

And that’s actually all the effects I used to make that gifset. It was way more than I thought it was, but explaining them all made me realise how much I learned, haha! If I didn’t go into enough detail for some of these, just shoot me another ask and I’ll try to explain more than I did here.