There’s a lot of wonder left inside of me and you
Thank God even crazy dreams come true
First of all, you need Adobe Photoshop CS5 because that’s what I used here, and the video where the gif will be coming from (if the video is from youtube or other video streaming sites, you may download a screencapturing software. I recommend Camstudio). Okay, here we go…
1. On the File menu, select Import —> Video frames to layers…
2. Locate and select the video you need, then click the load button.
3. Upon clicking the load button, this window will appear:
Select the part of the video you want to gif (instruction is right there). The shorter, the better (for tumblr, at least, because of its size limit). Click OK.
4. Layers from the video will be generated and will appear on your workspace.
5. Go to the Window menu and click Animation for the animation window thingy to appear. This is like the controller, you have there the play, stop, next, etc buttons. You’ll see here the frames of your gif, too.
6. Try to play the animation. Go through the frames and delete the irrelevant frames (duplicates or just unnecessary). This will help minimize the size of your gif (again, tumblr limit!). Also, fix the delay time if needed (0.03 on the image above. I changed it to 0.08 sec. on this example).
7. Now, resize the photo. I used the crop tool (with fixed dimension 500x250)
8. Adjust the lighting and colors (if you want). Click the pie graph-looking button below the layers pane. You will see lots of options there. Explore and experiment!
9. Now I want to hide parts of the video that are unnecessary so I made a new layer above all the other layers and covered them using the brush tool.
10. If you noticed, most of my gifs have a texture of sorts. If you want them too, download free textures online or make your own then open it. Copy the texture and paste it on your gif (above all the other layers!).
11. Select the blend mode you want for the texture on the layers pane (inset). In this example, I used subtract.
12. Now add some text!
13. Experiment some more! Add new layer, fill it with color, change blending mode, adjust the lighting more, etc. Whatever tickles your fancy, really. Just try things out. There’s always the undo button anyway.
In this example I added a new layer, filled it fully with color maroon, and used the subtract blending mode.
14. If you’re already satisfied, you’re ready to save your work! On the file menu, select Save for Web and Devices. This window will appear:
As I’ve said earlier, tumblr has a 499K limit on photos so gifs that will exceed the limit won’t move on tumblr. You can see the filesize of the gif on the lower left corner of the window. If it exceeds 499K, you can change certain qualities of your gif to lessen its size, like choosing less number of colors. This destroys the gif’s quality, but oh well. Once satisfied, click the save button!
AND YOU’RE DONE!
Tip: If you’re adding stuff that you want to appear on all the frames, make sure it’s on top of all the layers. Also, do all the editing for these on the first frame so all the other frames get changed as well.
I hope that helped! I know this is simple but this is pretty much how I make all my other GIFs, too. I just try different stuff on each of them so they don’t really look all the same. Also, I’m a horrible teacher and I might have slipped some information aside, so if you guys have questions, just ask me.
<3
Dianne’s top 15 favorite musicals (in no particular order):
└ 04. In The Heights | With patience and faith, we remain unafraid.
Dianne’s top 15 favorite musicals (in no particular order):
└ 05. Avenue Q | It sucks to be us, but not when we’re together!
