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miwtual · 1 year ago

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PHOTOPEA GLITCH TRANSITION TUTORIAL by kai @heroeddiemunson

howdy! so i’ve recently come to realize that i haven’t come across any tutorials for creating a glitch transition on photopea. as someone who has done this transition many times in photopea, i figured that i should create a tutorial to show how i personally do this effect!

what you need:

photopea (basically photoshop in your browser, completely free!)

basic giffing knowledge, because i won’t cover it in this tutorial (other tutorials: tutorial by @benoitblanc, tutorial by @ashleysolsen)

i also recommend watching this youtube video for a real time visual of what i’m going to be describing in this tutorial. this video is what taught me how to do this glitch effect, so if how i’m describing it is at all confusing, check out the video to see it in action!

without further ado, make sure you save your psds regularly and let’s begin the tutorial :)

step one: making your gifs

before we do anything, you have to first make the gifs that you are going to doing the glitch in between. for the sake of this tutorial, i will be transitioning between two gifs, but this tutorial works for however many gifs you want to glitch between for your edit. here are my two gifs that i will be transitioning between:

i highly recommend keeping these individual gifs small in their frame count to make sure your final gif doesn’t go over tumblr’s size limit. the gifs i am working with are both 22 frames; you dont have to make the gifs have the same amount of frames, but i do it because i think it looks cleaner.

with your two gifs, edit them however you would like. if you have a specific order you’d like the gifs to look/a way that your finished product will look like (ex: black and white with a transition to fully colored), then you should color them accordingly. here are what my gifs look like after fully editing them:

once you’re happy with your editing, go to file > export as > GIF and save your gifs. now that we have our gifs to transition between, let’s make our canvas!

step two: making your gifs’ canvas

now that we have the gifs we’re going to be transitioning between, we need to make a “canvas”, or place where we put these two gifs in order to transition between them. so, going to file > new…, create a new canvas. here are the specifications for my canvas (size of your canvas may vary, depending on your cropping for your gifs):

the background for this canvas doesn’t really matter like it does when you’re blending two gifs, but i still made my canvas’s background black because it contrasts the brightness of the gifs i’m placing onto it.

with your canvas now created after clicking “Create”, open up the two gifs that you will be transitioning between. right click the gif’s folder in the layers panel on the right, and select duplicate into… and choose the canvas you just created. once your gifs have been duplicated into the canvas, your layer panel should look something like this:

if you didn’t duplicate your gifs in order, arrange your gifs however you want them to appear. from here, we can now get to the purpose of the tutorial, creating the glitch effect!

step three: creating the glitch effect

generally, with any transition effect, i like to make my gifs seem like they are endlessly looping. while this is a little more work when it comes to giffing, i do think it gives the gifs a nice polish and doesn’t make it feel like there’s a harsh transition between the gif’s looping cycle.

click the eye next to your top most gif(s) in order to make it invisible, as we will worry about it later. scroll down to the layer titled “_a_frm0,50”, right click, and select “duplicate layer”. this should create a new layer, “_a_frm0,50 copy”, on top of the original layer. double click on the copy, and you should see this pop up:

below the fill slider, you should see something titled “channel” with three checkboxes with R, G, and B next to each checkbox. you can uncheck any one of these checkboxes for a different effect; unchecking the R box creates the stereotypical red/blue glitch effect, unchecking the G box creates a green/pink glitch effect, and unchecking the B box creates a blue/yellow glitch effect. for my transition, i have chosen to go with the blue/yellow glitch effect by unchecking the B box. however, you can play around with whatever effect you prefer for your gif.

once you have chosen what checkbox to uncheck, click “OK”. with the “_a_frm0,50 copy” still selected, make sure you have the move tool selected (the curser at the top of the left toolbar), and choose the direction you want your glitch to go and move the layer using the arrow keys on your keyboard. it can move as much or as little as you want, whatever looks good to you! i chose to move this first layer 10 clicks to the left and 5 clicks up, which creates this effect for my first layer:

which looks cool, right? now, you could stop here with the glitch effect, but me being me, i’m extra, so i’m going to include the next half-step that you don’t have to follow unless you want to.

step 3.5: the glitch effect, advanced

with “_a_frm0,50 copy” still selected, go to the left toolbar and find the rectangle select tool (right under the move tool from before). this part is a bit tedious, but i like the results, so i feel that the work is worth it.

using the rectangle select tool, make a shape around part of the layer, and then go back to your toolbar and select the move tool again so we can move the selected section. do you remember how many clicks you used to move your layer and in what direction it goes in? well, now, do the opposite; since i moved 10 clicks to the left and 5 clicks up, my selected section needs to go 10 clicks right and 5 clicks down. below is what this looks like before and after moving the selected area:

once you’re happy with the moved selection, go to the top bar and go to select > deselect so that you are no longer selecting the section you just moved. repeat this step however many times you like; i tend to do this about 5 times for each layer of varying sizes/lengths to allow variety. here is what the final product looks like for this first layer:

and viola! your fully glitched layer one. now we can move on with the rest of the tutorial.

step three, continued: creating the glitch effect

now that you have finished this layer, make sure you have selected both frames “_a_frm0,50” and “_a_frm0,50 copy” by left clicking while holding down CTRL on your keyboard. with both layers selected, right click and choose the “merge layers” option in the popup; this ensures that the glitch effect that you have created stays as one frame.

now we get to do this many more times! make your next layer, “_a_frm1,50”, visible by clicking the little box next to it in the layer panel, and repeat the before steps. i personally alternate between what direction my glitches go in to add more variety and interest for my gifs. so, for example, with my “_a_frm0,50” frame, i moved it 10 clicks to the left and 5 clicks up; this means, for “_a_frm1,50”, i’m going to move it 10 clicks to the right and 5 clicks down, so on and so forth.

i do this for the first 3 frame layers and the last 3 frame layers for both gifs. when your gifs are finished with their individual gif transitions, they should (individually) look like this:

and together, they should look something like this:

and that’s the hard part done! congratulations, you just made a glitch transition!

step four: finishing touches

now, this entire step is optional, as if you already did stuff like add text to the individual gifs you are using this transition with, you’re probably already done. however, if you’re like me and you’re making a gif where the text remains stationary on top as the gif itself transitions underneath, take this time now to do so.

i will also note that if you want your gif transition to match with the rest of your gifs, you can do that in this layer. for example, i want the blue in the transition to be purple like in the rest of my gif; to accomplish this, i will use a combination of a hue/saturation layer and a selective color layer to make the blue be purple (which does change the purple a little from how it was originally, but i don’t mind). i would put these layers on top of both of my gif layers so that the transition layers in both gifs get the same coloring. doing so creates this effect:

(that isn’t a step that’s required by any means (nor do i do it all the time), but in case you wanted to do that, now you know!)

now that i am fully happy with how the gif looks, i will add my finalized text and end up with this as my final product:

now, if you run into the problem of your gif being a little too large for tumblr’s size limit (for example, my finished gif was 10.7MB, and the limit for 540x540 gifs is 10MB) and don’t want to redo all of the process of doing the glitch effect after deleting some frames, i recommend using ezgif’s gif optimizer. it helps shrink the size of your gif without costing you the quality of your gifs. :) i dont normally recommend that for other types of gifs where it’s easier to delete frames, but in this case i know that deleting frames and having to recreate the glitch effect may be annoying!

other than that, this is the end of the tutorial — congrats, you know how to make a glitch transition in photopea! good for you! :) if you ever need any help with photopea, or have a request for how i have done an effect, please feel free to shoot me an ask and i’ll do my best to explain or make another tutorial to help!