#just something i've been thinking about observing the bg3edit tag

[mercymaker]

A couple of general gif-making tips for anyone trying out the craft!

When resizing your footage, always leave yourself a couple of pixels for margins.

I see a lot of people make this mistake when it comes to making gifs, where they resize their footage to the exact dimensions of the end gif. However, that almost always results in the pixels closest to the outside border going semi-transparent, which when saved as gif results in gifs having these tiny 'borders'.

I zoomed in a bit, but you can see that the outer edge has a line. Those are the semi-transparent pixels.

To avoid that AND leave yourself some wiggle room when it comes to moving screenshots or cropping, resize your footage to the target dimensions and add +2, +4 or +10 pixels to the number. After resizing you can then crop away the margins which will result in cleaner edges and will get rid of the transparent border.

For example, tumblr's full-post width is 540px so if I were resizing say 1080p footage, I'd put the width as 544px or 550px and then crop the edges (I use canvas size option for this) to 540px.

Make sure to use proper dimensions!

Tumblr will automatically resize your gifs to set dimensions and if your gifs are shorter or wider than those sizes, you will lose quality and sharpness in your gifs.

Ava (@anya-chalotra) has an excellent guide on dimensions and gif sharpness (as well as some other excellent information in giffing department) that goes into exact numbers.

I mostly make gifs that are full width, so they're always 540px wide.

Be aware of the size limit

According to tumblr's own guide, the general max limit is 10MB. However, anything over 3MB will be compressed by tumblr. That can result in quality loss, but most gif-makers ignore the compression and try to 'squeeze' out as much as possible out of a gif.

Some tips on how to lower your gif size to fit within the limit:

Reduce the number of frames.

Try to restrict the colors used to a selection (I usually try to have one or two dominant colors). Gif format only supports 256 colors anyway, so if you try to include all the colors of the rainbow, things might look wonky anyway.

Darken parts of your gif (usually brighter gifs tend to take up more space, so adding some darker shades can help reduce the file size).