#ive been making gifs since like 2015 (not counting breaks) and i still learn new things!

[loganhowlctt]

Hiii, sorry to bother you but I was wondering if you could tell me how do you sharpen your gifs? The ones from your pinned post look so great I'm in love. I hope you're doing good 💗💗💗

hii! don't worry you're not bothering me at all, i like getting asks :) thank you!! i don't think i do anything super out of the ordinary when sharpening my gifs, but i can show you some settings and give some tips!

in short, the way i make my gifs is load it into photoshop, convert frames to timeline and make them a smart object, crop the image how i want and shrink it to 540px, then sharpen it and then colour it. it's best to work with an image that's same size as what you're actually uploading, bc if you edit the whole thing and then size it down you might lose quality.

as a general tip, i’ve noticed gifs of things like action scenes are usually less sharp bc there is a lot of movement, so keep that in mind. and ofc dark scenes are harder to get sharp.

to sharpen my gifs i use smart sharpen, these are my settings:

i've tried a lot of different sharpening settings over time, but i found out less is more. sometimes i also add noise, which can help sharpen a gif more, especially if its a dark scene. but it also increases your filesize so be aware of that.

for that i use these settings, although i might change it around a bit.

besides that i've noticed that it really helps to have a lot of contrast in your gifs! obvious shadows and highlights, and with a clear difference between colours. i like having vibrant gifs, but it also helps making them more clear. photoshop can only pick a palette of 256 colours, and your gif wil export sharper if there are more unique colours, instead of all being in a similar spectrum.

these are my export settings:

(instead of noise you could also increase lossy a bit, it has a similar effect but actually decreases your filesize. but don't add too much, if i use it i always keep it under 15)

this is the palette before and after i coloured my gif, with colouring is a lot less monotone!

and this is the difference with and without colouring (but with the same sharpening settings): 

so you can see it isn’t just in the sharpening settings, it’s a lot of the colouring too! 

i always upload my gifs to my drafts first so i can see how it looks on mobile (bc we all know there’s a huge difference unfortunately lmao). just also be aware that sometimes mobile doesn’t load the gifs correctly, which makes them look low quality even though they aren’t. what helps for me is to force stop the app and reopen it, until it looks like what i know it’s supposed to. the top gif here isn’t loaded correctly, the bottom one is.

so yeah that’s basically it! a combination of the right sharpening, colouring and export settings. please let me know if you have any questions, like i said you’re not bothering me, i promise! 😊